The Terror Beneath, our investigative RPG of Weird Folk Horror, is out in the UK this week! Hear from illustrators Brainbug Design about the creative process behind the game's iconic visual style, in our second behind-the-scenes blog...

Hi, this is Aidan from Brainbug Design, here to talk a bit about our work on the soon-to-be-released masterpiece of folk horror roleplaying, The Terror Beneath. If you’re a fan of Osprey’s then you might know us from our work on The Silver Bayonet. We’ve been lucky enough to have been involved with that since its inception and, thanks to our work on that, Osprey were kind enough to ask if we’d be interested in working on something a little more spooky, surreal, and shrouded in fog… Of course, we were compelled to say yes, and see where this journey into the mist-shrouded realm of 1920s Britain took us. The only price we had to pay was our sanity and awareness of the greater cosmic power that loomed behind the ever-weakening walls of reality. So, business as usual for us really.

The Brief

The brief we were given asked us to pay homage to classic British folk horror and infuse this art with an otherworldliness that enhanced the atmosphere of shifting realities… The blurring of the walls between our modern world and our collective unconscious, and the still-potent power of the legends and myths that bind us to the land and our ancient past. Naturally, this was all music to our ears.

Coming from the west coast of Ireland myself, I’ve long been exposed to and inspired by similar themes. The landscape around us was dotted with relics from a bygone prehistoric era – mysterious standing structures, enigmatic stone circles, and half-hidden burial mounds of once-forgotten kings and druids.

In addition to these formative memories, classic British folk horror literature and film has been layered on top like ghostly sediment, looking to the works of Arthur Machen, and films like The Wicker Man – so it didn’t take much digging to find inspirational bedrock.

An illustration of a steep path up to an old burial mound, lit purple by the glow of strange torches and with a greenish tint coming from within An illustration of a factory streaming pollution into a green-tinged sky, with the smoke clouds forming into strange occult symbols above

Finding the Style

With our tone and themes locked in, as illustrators our job was to now convey all of these ideas visually. Under the direction of our Art Director, Phil Smith, we honed in on some key ideas that we wanted to explore:

  • Not typical “folk art horror” – no woodcuts, or scratchy engravings. We wanted things to have a cinematic flair, like posters or screenshots from low-budget British horror movies. This meant limited palettes, sometimes almost monochromatic to reflect the limitations of poster printing of the time
  • Mind-bending colour – with the nature of reality itself being under investigation, we wanted that to be reflected in the colours used in the images. Making things otherworldy and off-kilter with unusual and unexpected colour combinations seemed like the natural thing to do. So, wherever possible we tried to skew things into unexpected directions to enhance the air of uncertainty and psychological horror – like walking across a moonlit field under shifting aurora borealis tinting the world into unfamiliar tones of green and purple.

With those key stylistic ideas locked in place, the next step was to implement them!

To help us with this process, we took things a step further and actually created rough 3D block-outs of some of the scenes to allow to place cameras in the scene. This way we could compose and direct our compositions as if we were shooting them on an actual film set... this seemed to work pretty well! As a result there’s a reality that grounds even the more ethereal illustration into something believable – as if it somehow could exist, in spite of the fantastical elements.

Two black-and-white concept sketches of a ruined farmhouse with occult markings daubed on one wall

A nice example of this can be seen in the “Ruined Farmhouse” piece. In the sketch you can see how simple the composition is, with simple stark lighting – but it’s still only in black and white, and largely what you might to expect to see. But with the addition of colour in the final image, and the lo-fi grainy aesthetic applied, you can see how the subject is taken out of its familiar context into something just a little bit stranger and more unsettling.

A final illustration of the above sketches, coloured in a sureal purple glow

The End Result

At the end of all this, we had ourselves a body of work that hopefully does justice to the amazing setting developed by author, Scott Malthouse. As a project, this was pretty much a dream come true for the team here at Brainbug – paying homage to some our favourite artistic and thematic inspirations, and hopefully adding something of our own to the history of British folk horror. We hope this isn’t our last opportunity to wander the eldritch streets of a mystic Britain and, even more than that, we’d love to think our work has helped immerse you even further in the worlds created in the pages of this book.

The Terror Beneath is out 24th October in the UK and 12th November in the US.

Pre-order now.

A banner image with an illustration of a shadowy figure walking through the fog of a 20th-century London street alongside a stylised scrap of paper with the words "The icy limbs of a spectral fog creep through the gloomy London streets. A figure fades away from the glow of street lamps, the shadows concealing the stranger's crooked horns..."