Deadlands character art: a TTRPG-specific brief guide

Imogen sent me a brief on a Wednesday in August that read, in full, "Huckster, mid-thirties, has just lost a piece of his soul at the table and knows it." That was the whole thing. No outfit notes, no reference images, no campaign context. I started painting from that sentence the same night and we shipped the piece eleven days later. Deadlands is the only system I work in where one sentence can be enough, and that's because the archetypes do half the brief for you if you know what to ask for.

I'm Hector. I run Design Vortex, and Deadlands commissions are about a quarter of my western workload in any given year. The game has a louder fanbase than the broader weird-west space, and the briefs come in waves whenever Pinnacle ships a new sourcebook. This is the long version of the conversation I have with players who are about to commission their first Deadlands portrait — what the archetype matrix actually demands, where the Reckoner influence shows up visually, why the palette logic is different from straight historical western, and what to put in the brief so I'm not writing back the same day with six questions.

If you're new to the broader genre, the western character art commission guide is the wider starting point. Come back here when you're sitting down to write a Deadlands brief specifically.

Table of contents

• Why Deadlands briefs are different
• The archetype matrix
• The Reckoner influence — visual cues
• Weird-west palette logic
• What to specify in the brief
• Common mistakes that wreck a Deadlands portrait
• Starting a brief

Why Deadlands briefs are different

A historical western brief lives or dies on period accuracy. A 1873 Colt Peacemaker in an 1855 scene wrecks the painting. A Deadlands brief sits on top of all that and then asks a second question — how much of the supernatural shows. The painter has to know where on the scale from "this is a normal frontier portrait, the magic is implied" to "this character is openly haunted, his hands are wrong" the piece sits. That decision changes the lighting, the palette, the eye treatment, and the level of subtlety in the rendering.

The other thing that makes Deadlands different is that the archetypes are tightly defined visual targets. In a homebrew western, "gunslinger" is a vague register. In Deadlands, Gunslinger is a discrete Edge with a discrete fictional history — the player has likely read about it in the sourcebook and has a mental image. The brief is sometimes shorter than a fantasy brief because the system has already done some of the work, and the painter's job is to honour that shared mental image without painting six other people's Deadlands characters at the same time.

The last difference is tone. Deadlands is not a comedy game and it is not a pulp game, even though the iconography sometimes drifts that way. The system's lore — the Reckoning, the Reckoners, the Hunting Grounds, the ghost rock economy — is genuinely tragic. The portraits I'm proud of treat the character with the same gravity I'd treat a Curse of Strahd NPC, and that's the register I default to unless the player explicitly asks for something lighter.

The archetype matrix

Deadlands has a wide cast of archetypes, but six come across my desk repeatedly. Each one paints differently, and each one wants something specific in the brief.

The Huckster is the gambler-mage who powers his spells through hexen poker — a card game played against the Reckoners themselves, where the stakes are pieces of the huckster's soul. I paint hucksters in three-piece wool suits that have seen better days, often with a vest unbuttoned at the bottom and a shirt collar dark with the work of a long night. A deck of cards is almost always visible — mid-shuffle, fanned across a table, or just held loose in one hand. Eyes do most of the storytelling. A huckster who has won a lot of hands looks predatory. A huckster who has lost too many looks like someone who can hear something in the next room.

The Mad Scientist is the engineer-inventor whose blueprints come from the Hunting Grounds, whispered into his head by the Reckoners and the dreams they push through. I paint mad scientists with their workspace half-visible behind them — brass automatons in pieces, tesla coils on a workbench, a partially-assembled ghost-rock-powered weapon. Goggles on the forehead, not on the eyes. Leather apron over period dress, sleeves rolled, hands scarred from work. The cliché to avoid is the wild-haired Einstein. Most 1880s engineers were precise and careful, and a mad scientist who has been at it for ten years is closer to a watchmaker than a circus inventor.

The Gunslinger is the recognisable centre of the western. In Deadlands, the gunslinger trades a piece of his luck for supernatural reflexes, and the painting often catches him at the moment that trade is sitting on him hardest. I paint gunslingers in late-1870s through mid-1880s dress — long duster, soft-crowned wide-brimmed hat low over the eyes, two revolvers more often than one (a Colt Peacemaker and a Schofield, or two Peacemakers, or a Peacemaker and a small backup piece). The hat shadow does the work on the upper face. The eyes underneath the brim are the negotiation between "alive" and "alive on borrowed time."

The Texas Ranger is the lawman archetype, and the brief here is closer to historical accuracy than fantasy. Wool sack suit or a three-piece, silver star pinned to the lapel or carried in a vest pocket, a long-barrel Colt in a high-rise holster, a Winchester rifle scabbarded on the saddle if a horse is in frame. Rangers in the Deadlands timeline are agents of the Agency, which means there is a layer of "this man knows what he is hunting" sitting behind the standard lawman read. I paint Rangers with a kind of weary professionalism — the face of someone who has buried a partner and signed up for another tour anyway.

The Brave and Shaman archetypes draw on Indigenous American spiritual traditions, and the way I approach this brief depends entirely on the player. If the client is Indigenous themselves and has a specific tribal context, their input is more useful than my reference shelf, and I'll lean on what they bring. If the client is playing the archetype as written, I work from pan-Plains visual language that respects the source rather than caricaturing it, and I'm transparent in the kickoff call about what I can and can't do well. I will not paint a generic "Indian shaman" composite. I will paint a Lakota wakáŋ* iŋyaŋ, a Comanche scout, a Cheyenne medicine person, with specificity and care, when the player can tell me which.

The Harrowed is the archetype that needs the most painting craft. A Harrowed is a person whose body has been claimed by a manitou — a demonic spirit from the Hunting Grounds — but who is still conscious inside it. The visual challenge is that the character should look mostly normal at first glance, and the wrongness should reveal itself slowly. I paint Harrowed with one or two subtle deviations: an iris colour that doesn't quite match the species expected for that face, a shadow that falls in a slightly wrong direction, a hand whose veins read darker than they should. The Reckoner is underneath the skin, not on top of it.

Deadlands portraits go wrong when the supernatural is the headline. The supernatural should be the undertow.

The Reckoner influence — visual cues

The Reckoners — War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death — are the antagonist forces driving the entire Deadlands cosmology. They feed on fear. They warp the fabric of reality where their influence is strongest. The Deadlands setting is, mechanically, the result of their long campaign to bring the Hunting Grounds closer to the living world.

In a portrait, the Reckoner influence shows up as small wrongness. The painting respects the physics of the scene for the most part, and then breaks one rule. I keep a mental checklist of cues I might use, depending on how haunted the character is:

• Light that falls off too fast. A lantern that should illuminate a six-foot radius only reaches three feet. The shadow swallows the character's edges faster than it should.
• Shadows in the wrong direction. A subtle one — maybe his shadow on the wall falls a few degrees off from where the light source predicts. The viewer's eye notes it without consciously registering the cause.
• Reflections that don't quite match. Eyes that catch a highlight from a light source that isn't visible in the painting. A whiskey glass that reflects something other than the room.
• Skin tone that drifts cooler than the lighting predicts. A face lit by warm lantern light that nonetheless has a grey-blue undertone in the shadows where the warm fill should be.
• A second-pass detail that reveals slowly. A hand with one finger half a knuckle too long. A pupil that's not quite circular. A vein pattern that runs the wrong way under the wrist.

Use these sparingly. One per portrait is usually enough. Two starts to look like a Halloween costume.

The painter craft here overlaps with horror character art commissions, and a lot of my Deadlands Harrowed work shares technical DNA with my Curse of Strahd pack. The weird west blending horror frontier spoke goes deeper on where the line sits between unease and camp.

Weird-west palette logic

Historical western painting uses three signature lights — dust shaft, golden hour, lantern. Deadlands keeps those and adds a fourth: ghost-rock green.

Ghost rock, the setting's signature substance, burns hotter than coal and casts a pale green-white light that doesn't quite match any natural source. I use it sparingly. A pale green pool of light around the firebox of a ghost-rock-powered locomotive in the background. A faint green undertone on the workbench of a mad scientist whose latest invention is running. A single greenish reflection in the eye of a Harrowed who has been near ghost rock recently. The colour should never dominate the palette — it should sit as a wrong note in an otherwise period-correct composition.

The broader Deadlands palette logic is darker than straight historical western. Where a 1880s cowboy portrait might live in warm golden-hour amber and dust gold, a Deadlands portrait of the same character might keep the gold but drop the values a half-stop and let more Ink shadow swallow the edges. The painting feels period-correct but slightly underexposed, as if the world is dimmer than it should be. That's the Reckoner influence on the broader environment, and it reads in the palette before any explicit supernatural cue lands.

I tend to push Crimson harder in Deadlands work than in straight western. A blood-rust glint on a revolver's frame, a single red playing card on a table, a Crimson rim along the edge of a wound that's older than it should be — small specific reds in an otherwise warm-brown composition. The colour reads as "this is a violent world," but it does so without painting any actual violence.

Selene briefed me last spring for a portrait of her Harrowed Texas Ranger and asked specifically for a "noon scene, full daylight." I tried the thumbnail twice and the painting wouldn't sit right — the Harrowed wrongness needs the falloff that comes with a low light source. We re-shot to a kerosene-lantern interior scene with the Ranger sitting at a desk writing a report, and the painting woke up immediately. The deeper Deadlands wants the deeper shadow.

What to specify in the brief

A Deadlands brief is shorter than a fantasy brief because the system carries weight. The fields I actually need:

1. Archetype, with sub-specifics. "Huckster, runs hexen poker out of a brothel in Dodge" is more useful than "Huckster."
2. Era, within Deadlands' rough 1876-1890 timeline. The fashion shifts inside that window.
3. Region, because the Mason-Dixon-divided Reckoning America has very different visual registers north and south. A character based in the Confederate states reads differently from one in the Maze (the shattered California coast).
4. Race and gender of the character, plainly stated, with no euphemisms.
5. How haunted is this character? Scale of one to five, where one is "totally normal-looking, the magic is implied" and five is "openly Harrowed, the wrongness is the point."
6. Signature gear. One specific weapon, one specific accessory, one signature piece of clothing. Not a shopping list — the three items that matter.
7. A face reference. Even a rough one. Faces are the hardest part of any portrait and Deadlands doesn't change that.
8. Mood and lighting in one sentence. "Lantern-lit interior, late at night, after a hand he should have won" is enough.
9. Crop preference. Shoulders-up, bust, three-quarter, full body. I default to bust unless the player tells me otherwise.

That's nine fields. Five minutes of thinking, ten minutes of typing. The how to write a commission brief post covers the genre-neutral basics if you want to go deeper on brief craft.

If your character is one of the archetype centrepieces, the Deadlands at a glance huckster mad scientist gunslinger breakdown shows three painted examples with annotated brief notes, and the outlaw portrait wanted poster face piece covers what a wanted-poster-style commission needs that a standard portrait doesn't.

Common mistakes that wreck a Deadlands portrait

The recurring failures across two years of Deadlands commissions:

• Over-painted supernatural cues. Glowing eyes, green flames, lightning crackling around the hands. A huckster with green energy in the air around him reads as a video-game wizard, not a Deadlands character. The supernatural should be felt before it's seen.
• The wrong gun for the year. Already covered in the western firearms reference painting spoke, but worth flagging again. A Schofield in 1873 is wrong (it's 1875). A Single Action Army in 1872 is wrong. Get the dates right or paint a different gun.
• Generic Stetson on every cowboy. The Cattleman crease is iconic but era-specific. An 1876 character is more likely wearing a soft-crowned slouch hat. Look at period photographs, not Hollywood stills.
• Skipping the archetype's mechanical visual. A huckster without cards. A mad scientist without his workshop. A Texas Ranger without a star. These visuals are the genre's shorthand, and removing them makes the painting hard to read as the archetype it's meant to be.
• Indigenous archetypes painted as composite. Deadlands' Brave and Shaman archetypes need tribal specificity to work. If you don't know which tribe your character is from, that's a conversation for the brief, not something to leave to the painter.
• The Hollywood gunslinger squint. Eyes narrowed, mouth set hard, looking dead at the camera. It reads as a film still rather than a portrait. I default to slightly off-axis gaze and a quieter expression. The character is more interesting if he's not posing.
• Mismatched period accessories. A 1880s mad scientist wearing safety glasses with modern frame styling. A huckster in a vest that has period-wrong button placement. The painting reads correct when every small detail respects the year.
• Treating it as comedy. Deadlands has dark humour, but it's not a comedy game. Portraits painted with a smirking, tongue-in-cheek register sit awkwardly against the actual fiction. I keep the gravity of a Civil War portrait and let the supernatural sit underneath.

The character art process sketch color final walkthrough shows how these mistakes get caught at the thumbnail or colour-comp stage rather than at the final, and the choosing a commission style post covers which of the studio's painting registers fits Deadlands best (painterly almost always, occasionally lineart for a Harrowed character where the cleaner edges read well).

Starting a brief

If you've been carrying a Deadlands character around for a while — a huckster who is one bad hand away from a manitou riding shotgun, a mad scientist whose latest invention is making a sound he can't explain, a Texas Ranger who has known what he was hunting since the night his partner died — the order form is the most efficient way to get a brief in front of me. Tag it "Deadlands" in the notes so I know to use the weird-west register from the first read.

The portfolio has the closest current examples of weird-west palette work, and the character art service page walks through the full sketch-to-final process and what's included at each tier. If you're working on an original Deadlands-adjacent setting — homebrew weird-west, a self-published RPG hack, a campaign you want to publish — the custom projects page is the better starting point.

Write the one-line pitch first. "A huckster who has just lost a piece of his soul at the table and knows it" is a brief. It was Imogen's whole opening sentence, and we shipped the painting eleven days later. The system does the rest of the work if the pitch is clean.