Special Delivery

Today I illustrated a card which one day will be known as Special Delivery. It’s one of those cards that I felt deserved its own post, mostly because this character has been around for almost as long as the idea of this game itself.

Back in late 2024, I decided I was going to illustrate the game myself. I had no experience, no real plan and not much equipment either. I watched a lot of YouTube videos about digital illustration, installed Clip Studio Paint on my computer and started experimenting with a laptop mouse (which, looking back, was probably a pretty terrible way to start).

Very early on, I had the idea for a tutor card, basically a card that would search another card from the deck. For some reason, the character I imagined was somehow a random peacock-human hybrid working for the national postal service of that world. That became the first digital illustration I ever seriously tried to make.

Almost nothing from those early versions of the game I've started working on still exists today. There have been hundreds of iterations since then. Rules changed, cards disappeared, themes changed and entire ideas were abandoned. Somehow, this character survived all of it.

It kept coming back in every version of the game, even while pretty much everything around it was changing. At the current stage of development, I even considered replacing it with a cleaner or more obvious concept for a tutor card. But honestly, at this point it just felt wrong. Special Delivery was always the peacock-human mail creature, so changing that now would almost feel like replacing the card itself. The peacock stayed.

The tone and visuals of the game that eventually became Kravestorm changed a lot over time, so the final version obviously had to change too. The old cartoonish postal worker became something darker, stranger and much closer to what the game looks like today. But under all of that, it’s still the same character I came up with when I barely knew what I was doing.

Looking at the four versions side by side is kind of funny, but also a pretty good summary of the illustration side of this project. Special Delivery went from one of my first awkward digital drawings to something that finally feels like it belongs in Kravestorm. It took a lot of failed attempts and a lot of hours to get there, but I’m really happy this weird peacock somehow survived the whole journey.

Reed Arsenhorn