Bringing Terrus to Life

Art Design and Vision

Terrus is a world designed originally as a world-building project for RPG settings. The inspiration came from a trip to Italy in 2023, where we toured Rome, the Vatican, and Pompeii. At the same time, my wife and I caught COVID and were stuck in our Airbnb recovering and thinking about creative projects. What would happen, we thought, if humanity was wiped out by some sort of plague and the animals came to inhabit the ruins? How would they evolve? What societies would they create? What would they think about humans?

So, I began writing, designing a narrative, timeline, and ideas about the cultures, beliefs, and societal norms that might exist in this alternate history. As a life-long table-top gamer, I also had a number ideas about game mechanics that I thought would be fun to integrate together and make part of the Terrus world.

The Terrus TCG started to come together by the fall of 2023, especially with the expert design help of WanderingModa, who made all of the frames for the cards. Now with a clear style and background, I started working on the images so that I could experiment with a game prototype that conveyed the world-building concept. Bringing the vision to reality has been a exciting and educational journey, and I've only just begun!

Call to Artists!

This is a brand new game, which has not come to market, has no parent company, distribution or investment support. I have worked on this project for one year, developing the mechanics, storyline, and visual ideas.

Now I'd like to reach out to the artist community to find people interested in working with me on bringing the human touch to Terrus. Please feel free to contact me so we can get started!

AI and Terrus

Full disclosure, the images used for the entire prototype set of Terrus TCG were created using a Generative AI program called Leonardo.ai.

I've put a small robot icon (above) in the bottom left-corner of each card to indicate that it was made with generative AI.

Some image guidance was taken from my own photography and extensive edits were made using Adobe Photoshop.