Friday Art Attack

Before I begin; a few Star Wars rumors.  They may qualify as spoilers if they turn out to be true, but I suspect that they won't.  However... I kind of wish that they would.  These are awesome ideas; better ideas than I have confidence that the creative team is likely to come up with, honestly.  Anyway, if you don't want what may possibly turn out to be spoilers, avoid the "dot points" and scroll below them.

• Snoke is some kind of dark side vampire or mummy like creature.  In fact, the Brendan Frasier The Mummy is a perfect analog; Palpatine found him somewhere out in the vast unknown regions of the galaxy in a sarcophagus or something and brought him back.  Now, he's trying to regain his full power by absorbing force users like the Jedi.  Rumors suggest that at the end of the movie, he'll absorb Leia, and that's how she dies.
• Snoke is the author of the prophecy of the Chosen One, and the whole point of it is to keep Jedi and Sith in contention—it's all a bunch of manipulation, not some kind of "destiny".  The prophecy ended up being self-fulfilling.
• This means that Snoke is some kind of Ur-Evil that makes even the Sith look like chumps.  Doable, or trying too hard?  Don't know.  Don't know if there's anything to these rumors or not, honestly, so we'll see.

Anyway, if you're not here to get Star Wars rumors, I've also got a small announcement of sorts.  I've made sure to put some kind of paleontological image in my Friday Art Attacks, but I'm going to stop doing that.  Instead, I'll have a Monday post series, where I designate an "extinct animal of the week."  Needless to say, these will mostly be dinosaurs, but not necessarily always (I do love some of the classic Age of Mammals fauna, especially saber-tooths too much to ignore them.)  Because of this series, I'll probably not post much (if anything) about paleontology otherwise, so you don't need to worry about getting buried under a deluge of posts like the last two.  I'll just do one a week on Mondays.  (I'm tempted to do other series too, but let's not run before we're walking, as the saying goes.)

Well... maybe this is a kind of paleontology picture.  Do European cave men come home after a night out to find that cave lions have killed their women and taken over their homes?  Maybe.  Today, cave lions are extinct and European men are not.  I expect in the relatively near future that the savages who are today attacking their women and invading their homes will find out that that's what happens when you go too far.

I've had a funny obsession with orcs that are more human-like and less monstrous for a long time.  This is apparently an image used in a Paizo image, which is funny because Paizo's orcs are pretty much just monsters.  I don't know why I have that obsession; I guess it goes back to enjoying people in funny masks rather than "truly alien aliens."  Thanks a lot, Star Wars.  Anyway, I'm not really sure what to do with Gunaakt; orcs as monsters, or orcs as green-skinned tusked people?  We'll see.

Rather than Gunaakt, I'm finding myself more drawn to fleshing out Nizrekh, actually—the kinda piratey Egypt island country crawling with undead that are more sophisticated, ancient and maybe even more powerful (but if not, certainly they're very alien) than the Timischburg vampires.  Once I finally finish doing the CULT OF UNDEATH project, I'll start looking through more Paizo adventure products to see if anything can be lifted from them to continue to flesh out this setting, which is shaping up in some ways to be a smaller, contracted, cherry-picked ersatz Golarion in some ways, in the way that Timischburg itself ended up as a cherry-picked and customized faux Ustalav.

AD ASTRA has a bit more of a traditional space opera vibe, and this is almost a little bit too "straight up fantasy in spaceships" look to it to be a real space opera thing.  On the other hand; can I see the crew of a space pirate fleet marching into a town that they've bombarded from orbit to rape, plunder, and demand ransom looking a lot like this?  Yeah, I think so...

There's no doubt that the Shadow Sword class invented for DARK•HERITAGE and ported into FANTASY HACK, while based on the Jedi concept in most respects, is also meant to have more of the look and feel in actual practice to some kind of supernatural ninja.  I don't know that they'd be really overtly Japanophile, but still, they'd have to have something in common with the classic 80s supernatural ninja archetype, and they were designed as such from the get-go.

There's all kinds of potential dark lords; they don't have to all be demigods trying to conquer the world like Sauron.  In fact, I like the idea of regional dark lords; the idea of a Herne and the Wild Hunt, who has a tree deep in the Myrkwood Forest (note: I don't actually have a Myrkwood forest; that's a Germanic archetype, which is exactly why Tolkien used it) filled with skulls, and who surrounds himelf with Cat Sìth (or however you want to spell it—Scottish is a weird language) guardians.  Cat Sith sounds too much like the Darth Vader of cats rather than an actual folkloric creature, so I'd probably go with something like Cait Sidhe myself.

Anyone who liked The Grudge and/or The Ring and wants to see it amplified and brought into fantasy is going to love this bad mama jama.  Personally, and it's hardly the first time I've said this, I think fantasy is thoroughly enriched by looking through the horror tradition for inspiration.  Not that it hasn't always had a lot of crossover appeal, but sometimes it makes sense to overtly and deliberately cross-pollinate too. 

I've got more than one place where I get fed a steady diet of old, forgotten pulp stories (or at least their covers, which hopefully prompt one to go see if the story itself can be found.)  The summary of this story doesn't actually sound as much up my alley as I'd hoped, but that cover is unforgettable.  This is maybe a bit too 30s-40s pulp to be of too much specific use in AD ASTRA, which has more of a Star Wars aesthetic (even if both are clearly heavily influenced by 30s-40s pulp) but maybe I can find a way to work it in...

Do Timischburg and Nizrekh have some kind of connection?  Egyptian-style mummies?  Maybe Timischburg's undead were originally refugees of some kind of Nizrekh?

I believe that I probably grabbed this image from an old iteration of Wayne Reynolds' website.  But I lost track of what it was, and was trying to find for a long time the D&D book that included it.  Only to eventually discover that it was the cover art for a Reaper miniatures game.  Dwarves vs. undead?  Maybe that's why I have so few dwarves in the Timischburg and surrounding area setting.

I do still like the notion of old-fashioned looking space-ships coming up to lunar or asteroid dome colonies.  They're obviously limited in terms of what you can do with them, but not so limited that they can't be fun.  (Anyone remember the old Sean Connery movie Outland?

This isn't really an AD ASTRA usable piece of work; it's just Boba Fett with a double missile, a lightsaber, more weapons including a darksaber, and a pit bull.  It's Boba Fett amped up.  Cool image.

Although not utilizing the same alien races, obviously, Star Frontiers is another good analog in some ways to AD ASTRA; it's old fashioned pulp space opera.  Now, I don't necessarily like the idea of fighting worm-like Sathar, or working for some kind of "UN in space" kind of vibe.  I prefer a more Old West in space with settlers and pioneers rather than corporate interests and agents, or self-righteous exploratory government-funded ships (thanks, Star Trek, for that miserable trope.)

For those not familiar, this specific art was associated with the cover for Alpha Dawn Expanded.  There was a (lesser) piece of art featuring some of the same characters on a Basic book.  Together, the two would have had the same feel and appearance as the B and X of the Moldvay/Cook B/X series of D&D—which was current at the time, so that was almost certainly deliberate.  Star Frontiers doesn't use a system anything like D&D, though (sadly) because it was produced in an era when different systems was still all the rage... long before new system fatigue set in and most gamers decided that system for its own sake wasn't actually very interesting.

For the curious, there's a small treatment in the d20 Modern book d20 Future that is basically Star Frontiers ported over to that system.  Personally, I more just like the picture and the vibe that it gives off rather than anything specific about the game itself, which wasn't completely up my alley anyway.