Oof! Still not in the habit of doing this every Friday again. It's late, but I'm gonna throw one together real quick. I'm doing this from a different rig than the one most of my art is stored on, so the selection is a bit limited. You'll see a couple of themes of similar pictures or the same artist here today.
This is Clyde Caldwell. I don't know specifically what this is, but I imagine it's a Conan image, given the Amra the Lion shield, not to mention all fo the other cues that it contains. It's definitely got an imitation Frazetta vibe.
Ah, Barovia. I'm not a huge fan of Ravenloft in particular, but I do love—naturally—the idea of mixing horror and fantasy, so I love the imagery and tone of Ravenloft, at least, even if I'm often not thrilled with the specifics of the execution. The reality is, though, that gothic horror is a genre defined in large part by the spiraling of the protagonist character into personal horror or even becoming a monster himself. It's not really well suited for roleplaying of any kind, especially not D&D-like fantasy roleplaying, which is why the trappings are often borrowed but put into a different kind of context.
When I was a kid, there was a favorite non-fiction astronomy book of mine, and every single page had a David Hardy plate. I actually found that in a used bookstore just a few years ago and snatched it up as quickly as I could. I have three images from it in today's selection. This is an alien planet located in a globular cluster, and its meant to highlight a night sky that never really gets dark because of the massive concentration of nearby stars.
Here I can't remember the artist, but I got several images from a gallery of his (including a couple more down below) that are meant to invoke a kind of Slavic mythology. Because we've spent so long being in a state of Cold War with the Russians, we refuse to recognize the relatively close genetic brotherhood and similar cultural background context that the Germanic peoples like the English, for instance, and the Slavs have with each other. Family feuds are, unfortunately, the worst kind. Especially when we've both got other, more pressing threats that we're not addressing because of the fake feud that the West has with the European East.
Where I live, there's a fair number of Polish immigrants, or the descendents of them, at least. While I find that their Catholic faith is unlike what I grew up with in the South, where the standard Presbyterian and Southern Baptist were the norm, and that Polish food isn't anything that I will be writing home about anytime soon, I mostly like the locals. Then again, the Poles were always one of the few groups of Slavs that had more of a Western focus than most of the rest of the group, so we tended to see eye to eye much more often from a cultural, political and social standpoint.
I've also got a couple of these from some concept art for Cthulhu monsters. This was one of the moon beasts from The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath. Not exactly how I'd imagined them... but honestly, quite a bit better than I imagined them, so that's OK.
Nobody has or is likely to for quite some time, matched Angus MacBride for medieval and ancient historical artwork. Here we see the aftermath of a raid on a Dacian village by Roman soldiers—who were probably themselves Romano-Gallic in ethnicity by this point. Curiously, when Julius Caesar was looking for a candidate to go get involved with and conquer, his first thought was the Dacians, but opportunity provided him Gaul instead. By the time Trajan fought the Dacian Wars and conquered Dacia (or at least part of it) 150 years had passed since the conquest of Gaul, and the Gauls who remained had become pretty thoroughly Romanized.
Another David Hardy piece from my book, and honestly, this one was always my favorite. The night sky from an Earth-like planet orbiting a star just outside the Milky Way galaxy so that the Milky Way completely filled and dominated the night sky. Of course, although we didn't know this in the 70s when Hardy painted this, we now believe that the Milky Way is a barred spiral more like NGC 1300 whereas here it's portrayed as very similar to the Andromeda Galaxy, except rotated to a different point of view.
Another Lovecraftian concept art; this time the Haunter of the Dark from the story of the same name. One of the latest, if not the latest work that he wrote, it's also part of an amusing trilogy; Robert Bloch first wrote The Shambler from the Stars in which a protagonist character who was an obvious stand-in for Lovecraft himself is killed by the titular monster of that story, and Lovecraft then wrote this sequel in which a stand-in for Robert Bloch dies a horrible death. Bloch later wrote a third piece, although by then Lovecraft was long dead, called the Shadow in the Steeple.
This anecdote kind of cements my assertion that the Yog-Sothothery cycle was horror, sure, but it was also a wink wink nudge nudge in-joke quite often between the authors.
Some more pseudo-Slavic stuff. Keep in mind that Russia was founded by the Rus, who were allegedly northern Germanic Vikings from what is now Sweden. That's part of the reason why this stuff looks nearly as Viking as it does anything else, but like I said, the Germanic peoples and the Slavic peoples (and the Baltic too, for that matter) were actually closely related peoples. Although they may have not gotten along quite some time ago; many people see the northern European Tollense battle as a kind of late Bronze Age clash equivalent to the Trojan War itself, and as possibly being between Nordic Bronze Age traders and local Lusatan peoples; i.e., proto-Germanic and proto-Slavic (or proto-Balto-Slavic, at least). Although it should be noted that there are other interpretations there. Either way, both had been part of the same Corded Ware cultural and genetic horizon not all that many generations earlier, and their culture may have diverged, but was probably still pretty similar yet.
A pretty cool ink interpretation of the Barrow-wights. Barrow-wights is an odd word. Although popularized by Tolkien, it was actually invented by William Morris. And while it uses good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon roots, most of the native Anglo-Saxon folklore and pre-Christian mythology was lost. If the Anglo-Saxons actually believed in, or at least told stories about, something like barrow-wights, we have no idea what they were really called. The Old Norse word for the same creature is draugr or haugbuinn. Morris used barrow-wight in his translation of Grettis saga for what was written in Old Norse as a land-draugr. But haugbuinn is a more literal translation; from Old Norse for howe-dweller or barrow-dweller. It's not clear that they were really meant to be the same thing, or if they've merely been often conflated in different stories because of their obvious similarity as undead, deadly, revenant-type beings, similar to folkloric vampires before the Romanticists turned them into what we think of as vampires today.
Not sure where I got this image, but based on its look and the apparent artist, who's style is familiar, I'm guessing it is a White Wolf style werewolf of some kind from one of the many games that had werewolves over the years. In the 90s, I actually used to be quite into Werewolf: the Apocalypse, which I'm vaguely amused and maybe a little bit embarrassed by today, given how pretentious and self-righteous is comes across as today.
David Hardy illustrated the surface of a planet of a binary star; a red giant and a white dwarf in close association with each other.
Aaaand.... dang. Couldn't get it done quite in time and it rolled over to Saturday before I was able to hit post. Oh, well.
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