Dark•Heritage, Fantasy Hack and Cult of Undeath

How would I see each of these illustrations reflected in my ruleset/settings? (My ruleset is heavily informed by assumptions that are common to these settings, of course.)  Grabbing a few pics that recently fell across my hard drive.

Contrary to the high fantasy assumptions that are based on a Victorian (or at least Edwardian) morality, the pulps are almost gratuitous in their pandering to their audience.  Sexy women running around exotic settings, threatened by leering monsters who often want more than their lives, are saved by red-blooded, heroically masculine heroes that every woman swoons for in desire and every man yearns to be.  We need more scantily clad damsels in distress in any setting that uses FANTASY HACK as its rule base.  Those monsters are too weird to be woses or even werewolves; but they might be servitor daemons, extremely savage orcs, or most likely thurses.

There are few things scarier than a really bad woman, amirite?  The central character there is no doubt a sorcerous lich witch.  The champions around her seem to be wights; the one with the extra arms is really freaky, and should be represented by a wight with extra attacks.

This would be a pretty cool relatively difficult challenge for a group of higher level PCs.  A lich on her own would be a pretty difficult challenge, but three wights as reinforcements who arrive after a few rounds, including one with multiple arms, and then—what's that in the back, some kind of ghost?—round out the encounter by making the setting hazardous.  Steep staircases, high balconies, rotting superstructure that can collapse under the stress of combat, and haunts meddling with the PCs tactics... man, I'm already itching to run this baby, and come up with a brief backstory for this lich lady.

Ghoul sorcerers and a feral vampire riding on a fell ghast, attacking a sinking riverboat in a swamp... I don't even see anything that looks like PCs here, but I don't care.  It looks like there are chaos warriors there, which are of course a very Warhammer setting element, but it's hardly like powerful, daemonic black knights aren't a staple of all kinds of fantasy fiction.  I'd make them high level fighters, and then give them a few special abilities borrowed from the daemons, probably.

This would fit in quite well as a final battle in CULT OF UNDEATH, or as... well just about any relatively high level fight in any game or setting that uses FANTASY HACK.

Did I mention that we need more scantily clad damsels in distress?  I'm a little skeptical of the loin-cloth and pirate boots wearing barbarian (even if this is the cover to a pastiche Conan novel) because in real life, barbarians wore all kinds of leather and armor and other stuff like that, of course.    But whatever.  Some kind of crocodile or weird dinosaur, a water elemental (or even just a burst of water coming out of a tunnel) and holy crap, this would be fun.

I imagined Ketos as looking more like the Kraken from the new Clash of the Titans movie, but this would certainly work.  As an aside, I'm one of those guys who thinks that the textual evidence suggesting a "whiter" complexion for the aristocratic Greeks and Romans that lasted for centuries, if not millennia, before being swamped by the darker-haired Mediterranean people around them is almost impossible to ignore.  Then again, Andromeda was a "white Aethiopian"—not a Greek.  I've got Medusa in my monster list as well as Ketos, so this is a totally doable idea in FANTASY HACK.  As it should be.

RAWR!  This guy could pass muster as a thurse/sasquatch/gnophkeh, but he might be big enough that using ettin stats would be better.  And, again with the scantily clad damsel in distress!  You should look up fine art related to Perseus and Andromeda.  The poor girl is almost always naked according to the Renaissance and Romantic era artists.  Then again, I think they thought that the Greeks in particular just always ran around naked.

It's actually been a while since I regularly posted WAR pictures (although I posted a couple a few days ago).  I don't really have a ghost dragon per se.  I'd probably just make this a fell ghast.  In fact, I think that I like more and more the notion of fell ghasts being some kind of undead dragon—after all, they're based (loosely) on the terrorgheist model for Warhammer, which also doubles with a head swap and a few other details with the zombie dragon model.  So, all of these dracolich, zombie dragon, ghost dragon, etc. variants are all fell ghasts in FANTASY HACK.  As always, feel free to customize with a new special ability or two if you like, to make your version of the monster more exciting.  And I like the notion of crafting encounters themselves using a small, localized variant of the three act story structure; have this be the capstone of the encounter after the PCs have already been fighting undead creatures in a castle that's literally crumbling down on their heads, and suffused with some kind of necrotic pollutant that seeps through the walls like a cursed fog of some kind.

Although their inspiration was probably a little too on the nose, I couldn't resist adding ratmen, including rat brutes, to FANTASY HACK as an homage to the skaven and their rat ogres.  The Skaven are likely the best addition to the canon of fantasy by the Warhammer setting.  Although you've gotta admit that their chaos daemons are also really cool.  But since they're a hybrid of actual Judeo-Christian demons and Lovecraftian stuff, they're much less original.  Just very cool.

You'll notice that these pictures, if I'm using them to represent what I think a FANTASY HACK game—in any setting—should look like, that I'm clearly embracing a wahoo, gonzo, gratuitous exotica (and maybe even erotica) pulp aesthetic that no doubt the high fantasy tweed jacket and pipe smoking crowd would find vulgar.

Given that I consider The Lord of the Rings my favorite (by quite a long shot) work of fantasy fiction—or of any fiction, or even any literature, for that matter—it may seem surprising that I'm thinking of a much more pulpy feel for FANTASY HACK.  But then again, maybe not.  I've also said two things many times, which I'll repeat again here:

1. I'm not old school, but I'm definitely old fashioned.  I don't like old rules, and I don't like the "pixel bitching" and dungeoncrawling paradigm of play.  But I very much do like the pulp fantasy inspiration that informed early D&D, even if it's just crass thud and blunder, than I do to modern pseudo high fantasy extruded fantasy product.
2. Fantasy writers (or artists, or gamers, or any other creative type) would do well to recognize that Tolkien was a truly unique genius, and few can (or should) attempt to imitate him without having a bit more of his very unusual suite of talents and education, lest you want to come across as a cheap imitation.  Even other high fantasy guys who aren't modernized extruded fantasy product—and here I'm thinking of writers like Poul Anderson or Lord Dunsany, although there are plenty more to choose from—didn't try to sound like Tolkien (assuming that they post-dated him, which to a great extent they did not).  They did their own things based on mythology, Medievalist romances, etc.  So should you.