Book Review: Court of the Dead: The Chronicle of the Underworld

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Court of the Dead is an intellectual property developed by Tom Gilliland. It's a folklore of the Underworld as told through a curator for Death. It's very well written and almost matches the look and feel of recent artbooks on Magic The Gathering, more specifically Innistrad and Zendikar.

The book's a large 192-page hardcover. The page edges are coloured a sickly green and the book's spine is actually designed with a spine. The cover is an embossed drawing of a skull.

Collected within is a guide to the characters, whether they have flesh or not, the places, significant events and history of how the Underworld came to be. When I first read the fantasy writing, I thought this book was to accompany some card game which was why I made the MTG reference in the first paragraph.

The detailed and wonderful artworks are a mixture of illustrations and pencil portrait drawings. They complement the text well by giving visuals that are mysterious and dark to suit the atmosphere. This artbook is able to hold its own even without the text.

By the way, there's an accompanying website by the same name The Court of the Dead. There are some free downloadable short comics that expands on the world.

I feel that this is one of the better artbooks in 2016.

Court of the Dead: The Chronicle of the Underworld is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

If you buy from the links, I get a little commission that helps me get more books to feature.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp | Amazon.cn

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