Stephen Player
Fantasy Illustration
You may use this text as the basis of any type of illustration you like.
Temple of the Spider God
Illustration Brief
As a general point, the scenes set within Miramar or Quintos should reflect a Spanish feel, as the rest of the Orlandes Gamebook Adventures have. However, once we get to the Isla des Desperanza, the feel should be King Kong’s Skull Island crossed with Incan and Aztec influences.
Numbers in brackets refer to section numbers in the manuscript. These sections should be referred to when producing the illustrations.
1) Spider jumping out of chest
We are in Duke Rodrigo’s plush audience chamber. A large red and black Skullback Spider is jumping out of an empty treasure chest at our hero, fangs bared.
3) Ship’s hold
The hold of the galleon is heaving with spiders, each of them as large as a man’s head – some even larger – scuttling over the nets of their webs that festoon the place. You can see bundles of silk trussed up within the webs – things that look to be the size and shape of rats. But there are bigger things too.
4) The Guild of Explorers
The Guild of Explorers on Seafarers’ Street – a quirky-looking building that appears to have been constructed, in part, from a sailing ship itself, and with the statues of two bearded mermen flanking the entrance.
5) Useful stuff
A number of useful items that you can buy from Miramar’s bazaars (along with the less useful soapstone carvings of elephants and jade frogs). A vial of Anti-Venom, a rope and grapple, and an Aztec-looking Spider Amulet.
6) Old Man Oak
The branches of the oak are swaying violently from side to side, even though there is no breeze to speak of, and with a creaking, cracking sound, an ugly maw splits open in the trunk. This is no ordinary oak but a malign tree spirit.
7) Erasmo Farrook
Erasmo Farrook is I a merchant-trader, dressed in brightly-coloured silk robes and baggy pantaloons. Behind him stand four hulking ogre bodyguards.
8) Bandit leader
You are surrounded by bandits – dressed in black, armed with an array of vicious-looking nocked blades and cudgels, and with an equally impressive array of scars between them. Standing at the centre of the circle in front of you is their leader. Dressed like his followers but with his bald head uncovered, he is lithe as a panther and has a cruel rattlesnake’s glint to his one remaining eye – the other being covered by a leather patch.
9) Basilisk
You have followed goat tracks up a crag to a cave. You are surrounded by pile of bones – human as well as animal. Suddenly, something large, sinuous and reptilian stalks towards you out of the darkness at the back of the cave. You catch a glimpse of beak, a thick, lashing tail, a mottled brown hide and a pair of large, malevolently glowing yellow eyes. It is a Basilisk.
10) Scorpion Riders
You are in a stony gorge out in the desert hinterlands. Two, huge and hideous eight-legged forms appear on the rocky walls above and one more directly in front of you. They are scorpions, as large as cart-horses and covered in glossy black chitinous armour. Surmounting these monstrous arachnids are figures swathed from head to toe in flowing robes with pennants fluttering from banner-poles bearing the image of a red scorpion. The way the giant scorpions are constantly snapping their pincers, and the way they skitter from side to side on their many legs, sets your nerves on edge.
11) Three-headed Snake
You are in a large, circular, subterranean chamber, lined with snake-carved pillars. Coiled about a broken plinth in the middle of the domed chamber is a huge snake with three huge hooded heads – its thick body covered with scales like red lacquered armour. Hissing furiously, its trio of heads darting backwards and forwards, the gigantic snake suddenly writhes towards you.
12) Snake cultist
A robed figure emerges from behind a pillar, casting aside the blowpipe it has just used against you. Its hood slips from its head to reveal a grotesque visage that is somehow half-man and half-snake as it prepares to fight you, armed with a curving blade.
13) Scar Crabs
You are exploring the wreck of a ship, which is little more really than the deck of the lost vessel tilted at a sharp angle upon the half-submerged rocks which caused it. Scuttling towards you across the broken deck are several large crabs, their shells covered with sharp spines. The crabs’ claws snap constantly as they advance on your exposed position and more are clambering from where they have been lurking on the reef.
14) Kraken
You are on board the Kraken when the ship is attacked by the real, tentacled Kraken. Two paddle-tipped tentacles emerge from the water, along with a gigantic, hideous beaked mouth, above which are two jellied eyes, each the size of a ship’s wheel. The sea monster opens its mouth wide and you gag at the noxious smell of rotten fish guts that rises from its capacious maw. The water around it is awash with the monster’s inky ichor.
15) Pirate ship
The ship you are on is about to be rammed by a pirate ship. Protruding from its prow, just below the waterline, is a sturdy ram. The ram is shaped like a fist, covered in iron, and attached to a wooden support on the keel of the pirate ship
16) Fishmen
You are under the sea when you are attacked by two fishmen. These aquatic creatures – with bulbous, glassy eyes, pin-sharp teeth and bodies that are more humanoid than fish – appear from the abyssal darkness below a reef and attack.
17) Gryphon
You have just overcome a group of Reman trappers who have captured a Gryphon in a range of barren, dusty hills. However, the Gryphon is shaking itself free of the net that was previously restraining it. Spreading its wings wide, it rears up on its hind-legs and lashes out at you with its sickle-like claws.
More details about the Gryphon can be found at section 55. It is a magnificent beast, with the body of a huge lion married to the head and wings of a desert eagle.
18) Leviathan
A giant shark is ploughing through the waves towards your ship, jaws open wide. In fact it looks like it could swallow your ship whole.
19) The Vampire Varashta
You have been lured to an island castle and a feast with the vampire Varashta. Your companions lie sleeping around you, your host enters the room alone. Seeing you, Lord Varashta throws back his hood and you see him for what he really is. His head is utterly devoid of hair and his skull pulses with purple veins. His ears extend to bat-like points, his eyes glow red. He opens his mouth wide, revealing elongated canines. Talon-like fingers raised, the undead monster leaps at you hissing like an enraged cobra.
20) Giant Spider in the temple
You are in what was once a temple to Hydros, God of the Sea, but now it is home to another more blasphemous deity altogether. Suspended within a huge web, which is strung between columns beneath the domed ceiling of the chamber, and illuminated by the flickering flames of smoking braziers, is a monstrous spider, at least twice as big as a carthorse. Its bulbous body is mottled a filthy green and brown. Advancing towards you across the desecrated sanctuary are half a dozen spider-slaves – human hosts, each possessed by one of the red and black mind-controlling Skullback Spiders.
21) Sea Serpent
You are alone on board a tiny fishing smack out at sea. Suddenly, from out of the tormented waters in front of you rises a reptilian head atop a long eel-like neck. The sea monster fixes you with one fishy eye and then, hissing savagely, moves in for the kill.
23) Spider-web bridge
You find yourself standing on a rope bridge that has in fact been constructed from myriad spiders’ webs. The bridge crosses a wide gorge; far below, a fast-flowing river tumbles through the ravine but it’s one hell of a long way down. There are things wrapped up in the webs, and some of them are still moving. The web-bridge gives under your weight, but the multiple strands of silk securing it to the cliff-top hold firm and you continue across the bridge one step at a time. It isn’t until you are halfway across that the spiders appear. They are large black things, the size of dogs, with bulbous bodies and overlarge mandibles.
24) Great Ape
You are making your way through the jungle when you hear something crashing towards you through the undergrowth and freeze. Toppling two trees before it, the biggest ape you have ever seen bursts from the jungle, landing on all fours in front of you. It rears up on its hindquarters and beats a challenge on its chest. It must be at least twenty-five feet tall. The great brute ape knuckles towards you, snorting angrily, ready to tear you limb from limb for having invaded its territory.
25) Pygmies
The jungle grows thick around you, when suddenly half a dozen diminutive, dark-skinned figures emerge from the undergrowth, blocking the way ahead. They are wearing very little other than loincloths. However, they have adorned their bodies in a myriad other ways, from ritual scarring and tribal tattoos to necklaces of monkey skulls and bone piercings. You have trespassed within the lands of the native islanders – a tribe of pygmies – and from the looks of some of the bones adorning their bodies you suspect they may well be cannibals. They certainly look like they could handle themselves in a fight – judging by the flint spears they’re carrying and the blowpipe one of them is toying with.
27) Spider Centaurs
You are inside the maze-like tunnels of the Temple of the Spider God. The passageway you are following leads you into a darkened chamber. You hear the clatter of spears and suddenly torches burst into flame in front of you. And there, in the middle of the chamber, are two grotesque creatures that are an amalgam of man and spider. They certainly have the abdomen and thorax of huge, black spiders, at which point they merge into the torsos of men, with heads that are a hybrid of both. They thrust at you with their sharpened spears.
28) Egg room and Skullback Spider
You are at the centre of a vast rectangular chamber. There is a strange atmosphere to the place; the floor of the chamber is covered in a cloying, sickly-sweet mist. The tendrils of vapour part in your wake. Covering the floor as far as the eye can see in every direction are what appear to be sticky white egg-sacs. Your heart begins to race as you realise what they must contain. One of the pulpy egg-sacs begins to open. As you run from the rupturing egg-sacs, you trip the silken strands of a dozen more that burst open even as you approach them. One of the pernicious red and black spiders leaps for your face.
29) High Priest Cortez
You are standing at one end of a narrow stone bridge that crosses a natural fissure in the rock – a fissure so deep that you can’t see the bottom of it. On the other side of the bridge is a stepped dais, at the top of which a ragged-looking man wearing the spider-mask and robe of spider-silk that marks him out as high priest of the debased arachnid cult. He is on his hands and knees, bowing before a statue of a giant spider. Behind the sinister stone arachnid the wall of the chamber is covered with time-worn pictograms. At your arrival, the priest rises and turns to face you. His skin, although weather-beaten and tanned, and the shape of his features marks him out as a native Orlandean. He was once Caesaro Cortez – now he is the Servant of the Spider God.
30) Inzi the Spider God (72)
You are inside a dark, sepulchral chamber. The only light in the chamber is coming from the torch Cortez is holding. He stands there before you now, in the centre of the chamber amidst drifts of gossamer silk. But your appalled gaze is drawn towards the ceiling. There, lit by the flickering flames of Cortez’s torch, is the spider goddess herself, mother to the swarm that would enslave mankind, if Cortez were to have his way. You have never seen anything like it before. It is huge!