Simulcast on Black Gate: Dark Muse News: Saluting Goth Chick and Interviewing Waclaw Traier of War Claw Games
Happy New Year!
This emerging blog salutes Sue Granquist, who contributed every other Thursday championing Goth Chick News in this very time slot. Sue Granquist contributed 741 articles over 16 years here on Black Gate with a special focus on horror movies and conventions (the longest-running column in Black Gate history). Sadly, she passed away in November 2025. John O'Neill penned a moving tribute: Goth Chick, January 13, 1966 – November 18, 2025. The outpouring of comments there is a testament to her influence.
In short, 2025 was a sad year for Black Gate champions, marked also by the passing of Howard Andrew Jones last January and Rodger Turner in June. I imagine them bolstering Black Gate (especially John O'Neill) from beyond, as force ghosts and role models. Peace to those who fell before us.
Going forward, as a tribute to Sue's moniker "Goth Chick News" and the need to report on dark fantasy, I'll be bringing you "Dark Muse News."
Expect book reviews (weird fiction and Sword & Sorcery), narrative tabletop game perspectives, Gen Con coverage, and interviews on Beauty in Weird Fiction/Art (that interview series began in 2014 on my author blog and was taken up by Black Gate in 2018). We've hosted authors such as Carol Berg, Anna Smith Spark, Darrell Schweitzer, CSE Cooney, Scott Oden, CS Friedman ....and many more...the latest being Bryn Hammond.
Today, we follow up on Dec 11th's post Doom Pilgrim! – War Claw’s Solo Card-Game-Book. DOOM PILGRIM is a splendid mashup of weird, dark art with narrative gaming. If you ever enjoyed Fighting Fantasy game books, or any other choose-your-own-adventure with RPG elements, you need to check that out. Let's learn more about the creator and designer Waclaw Traier. Born in South Bohemia in 1984, he studied Philosophy at Charles University. He has been working as a Dark Fantasy illustrator since 2012.
BlackGate.com highlighted War Claw Game's flagship product DOOM PILGRIM in Dec 2025. Please introduce new readers/gamers to War Claw games. What can they expect from your products?
My games are usually art-heavy because I am at the first place an illustrator. Players of my games can also expect a bit of weirdness, because I usually do not like mainstream and tend to like more obscure, darker things. The genre of Grim Dark is very close to my vision, as it embraces not only grim darkness, but also a bit of grotesque humor.
The art style in the War Claw line-up is very distinctive. Please explain your illustration process. Is it watercolor?
It is, in fact, ink, which is close to watercolor, but there is one difference – when ink dries, it becomes stable and waterproof to an extent, while when watercolor dries, you still can clean it with water. And I also use acrylic sprays for background, usually metallic gold, silver or bronze, so the pictures shine under angles, and talking about watercolor, in the end, I use them too to add more colors when needed.
Please dissect an example (or a few) of how the art complements the text/story on the opposite side?
In my most popular game, DOOM PILGRIM, the art is usually just a hint of what you can expect in the story. For example, there is an old ruin of a black castle on the picture, but you do not know, until you turn the card, whether the event will be hostile, like for example castle of some dark lord, or if it is hideout for people who will be friendly to you and who can sell you provisions. To win the game, you have to get through the entire deck. The main mechanic is to draw three cards, judge the covers and decide: one to discard never to be explored, one to place on the bottom of the deck to connect with later, and the last to confront immediately. So the art is key, and mysterious.
Let’s talk music. Via your moniker Droned Artworks (www.droned.eu), you showcase Heavy Metal Covers. Seems like you may have started that prior to the game-card-books. What is the history there?
Exactly! I have done Heavy Metal covers from 2012, while my game designing started around 2020. I think it had two roots. One was the fact that when I published new paintings, I usually had a short story to each one and sometimes people told me that it is like a scene from a game or that I should give the creatures also their RPG stats. The second root of my game designing is the fact that I wanted to make prints from my paintings, but I felt that my customers should get more than just the print when they pay their money for it, so there was the idea to provide a small board game to each print – a small pen and paper adventure on the flip side of the print. But when I started designing these small games, I soon had so many ideas that I saw it would be a bigger journey than just flip sides of prints, haha.
War Claw Games Bandcamp Covers (link)
Coming from your cover art work, you have developed relationships with a bunch of music folk, which has spurred the development of soundtracks for your narrative games. What role do you play in the music? Do you provide lyrics, singing, music?
In one or two cases, it is my own band providing music (experimental Drone / Kraut Rock band Remízek, rather amateurish, to be honest), but in most cases, they are musicians I did cover art for in the past so I have good relationship with them, and so they agreed to make original soundtracks for my games. In these cases, I provide only the story, conceptual framework, and the rest is on them – I am not the musician here so I do not talk them too much into it, I just comment a bit on the creation, to finish some details. At the moment, Maxime André Taccardi himself, the illustrator and musician famous in the corners of Black Metal, is preparing soundtrack for my FLAILS & CITADELS board game and I give full creative freedom to him, as I am sure the result will be great.
You have a fascination with dark fantasy. Can you explain your muse, like where it originated and where it takes you?
My muse is the games I played when I was a kid. It was Warhammer, Magic The Gathering, Doomtrooper TCG, Talisman, and gamebooks, from which the biggest impact on me had the Sorcery! series illustrated by John Blanche. The darkness and weirdness of Blanche’s work was deeply inspiring for me, and I hope it is quite visible in my work.
Any inside scoop we can share exclusively here? I.e., what is something most people do not know about you or your creative endeavors?
Interesting question, haha. What to say? Maybe the fact that I am not familiar with modern board games, I know only Onirim, as it was available on mobile, and I don’t have time to play games, so everything I design is somehow old-school and different, because I don’t copy mechanics of successful hits, and rather invent my own, inspired by the few old games I mentioned.
Do you find beauty in your, or others’, weird fiction or dark art?
Hmmm, I never thought about it. It is a different kind of beauty for sure. To be honest, I don’t know why dark things are so fascinating for me, especially when I deeply hate such things as torture or war… Really hard to tell, why I tend to these motives in my creative endeavors.
Do you see beauty in the things that terrorize/scare you?
Fun fact: I was usually happy when I woke at night from a terrible dream because I had an inspiration for new horrors – and sometimes it indeed was terrible dreams, like for example a monster trying to whip us with stripes of skin flayed from its previous victims. I had such dreams quite often, but not so much now, maybe because I do not watch many horrors now, haha.
Any new releases in 2026?
Sure, a lot of them! Thanks to the economical genius on the USA throne I cannot sell my art to the USA now, so I have much more time to work on games than ever, and I plan on expanding DOOM PILGRIM universe – in January, it will be three new things, 54-card expansion INTO THE PITS, 36-card expansion DOOM PILGRIM Miserables, with characters and quests, and a new big box for the games. Also, in 2026, I plan on finally releasing my Corrupted Crypts, old-school dungeon crawler that has been in the making since 2020. So, stay tuned, please.
About Waclaw Traier
Waclaw Traier is a Dark Fantasy illustrator for hire, author of Grimdark board games. Contact him or learn more via these links:
S.E. Lindberg is a Managing Editor at Black Gate, regularly reviewing books and interviewing authors on the topic of “Beauty & Art in Weird-Fantasy Fiction.” He has taken lead roles organizing the Gen Con Writers’ Symposium (chairing it in 2023), is the lead moderator of the Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group, and was an intern for Tales from the Magician’s Skull magazine. As for crafting stories, he has contributed eight entries across Perseid Press’s Heroes in Hell and Heroika series, and has an entry in Weirdbook Annual #3: Zombies. He independently publishes novels under the banner Dyscrasia Fiction; short stories of Dyscrasia Fiction have appeared in Whetstone Amateur S&S Magazine, Swords & Sorcery online magazine, Rogues In the House Podcast’s A Book of Blades Vol I & II, DMR’s Terra Incognita, the 9th issue of Tales From the Magician’s Skull, Savage Realms Magazine, and Michael Stackpole's S&S Chain Story 2 Project.
