Friday Art Attack

I love big old floating cities in space.  I only have a few of them in my setting material (so far) for AD ASTRA, but it comes up with some regularity as it's an option in the randomized world generation results, as well as one in the character background material.  Obviously, there are unique challenges to the setting, both in-game (i.e., making such a place livable and manageable) as well as from a meta-perspective (i.e., making such a place interesting without making it too predictable and the same every time.)

I'm not quite sure what this is, but I really love this image.  Some kind of death cultist or undead, with a skeletal face—except instead of eye sockets, there's this smooth, skull-like indentation is all.  It kind of reminds me of the myrdraal's from The Wheel of Time (wow, talk about a series I gave up on a long time ago... but not for lack of good ideas here and there.)

Megalania—the giant komodo dragons of Australia; twice the size of the largest komodo dragons today, which are now relics in a handful of tiny islands, but which represent a period of time when these kinds of predators were dominant.  DARK•HERITAGE in particular has had a long and passionate love affair with Ice Age megafauna, which is much more varied and whatnot than most people think it is (most people just think of mammoths and saber-tooths, plus, they actually think that they just lived up in the snow.)

This looks more like a commando robot of some kind rather than a soldier in some kind of soldier-armor.  That's cool.  There's certainly a lot of room in AD ASTRA for commando robots.  That reminds me; one of the few things that AD ASTRA does still need in order to feel "complete" is a list of suggested antagonists.  Much of that will include making "NPC" like villains, including various combat robots, to fight.

I love this old-school looking space station and luxury yacht, or maybe liner, placed with dramatic scenic aesthetic in front of a Saturn-like big-ringed planet.  In my first image, my space city was floating over an earth-like planet, but in reality, of course, it would mostly be easier just to build on the planet in that case.

Yutyrannus huali, a "primitive" tyrannosauroid found in Liaoning Province of China—and the largest predatory dinosaur known to have possessed feathers (although presumably many others did too, and it's just that the preservation of evidence of feathers is wildly unlikely.)  About 125 million years old, and presumably from the Yixian Formation (although they weren't excavated by professionals, so that's not 100% sure).  It's possible that the feathers made Yutyrannus a "wooly tyrannosaur" since the climate was certainly temperate, and is notable for fairly cool winters, relative to what was normal during the Mesozoic.  This was a fairly big guy; Allosaurus-sized, but relative to more derived tyrannosaurs, was fairly old-fashioned in many ways; in fact, the most recent and probably best cladogram puts it in the Proceratosauridae; more basal even than Dilong.  This is unusual, because it is nothing like the relatively small and generalized early tyrannosaurs—rather, it clearly seems to be the apex predator of its environment.

Danger Will Robinson!  I find that the attempt to "mix up" the cliche of the damsel in distress just doesn't work.  A dude in distress doesn't have the same visceral quality to it.  I'm not sure that such clunky, old-fashioned robots side-by-side with the commando bot above makes any sense or not, other than suggesting that this is an extremely old-fashioned model that has somehow maintained itself on an isolated outpost somewhere.  Either that, or it was just designed by a totally different culture that doesn't really value anthropomorphism except in a vague sense in their robots.

This is just more of the same.  I had two pictures that were very similar, and I wasn't sure which to use, so you get both of them.  You may notice that Tobor is robot backwards, and that this was obviously a movie (Republic Pictures, 1954.)  The story itself was not too unlike Frankenstein in most respects

I like the idea of this as some kind of wooden-masked assassin of some kind.  In fact, maybe that's something I can do with the elfs of the greater TIMISCHBURG setting; they are unwilling to show their faces to the lesser races, so they all wear woodland masks.  Hmmm...