Friday Art Attack

I like having mighty thews vs apes; I guess it goes back to my very young fandom of Tarzan.  If you've never read the first two Tarzan novels (at a bare minimum) get off my blog right now, go get them for free at Project Gutenberg or from Amazon for your Kindle or Kindle app (or even web-reading) and read them.  But even before I could reasonably be expected to have read them, I was a fan of Filmation's old Tarzan show.  It aired in the mid-to-late 70s, and was surprisingly faithful to the tone and feel of the novels.

Jonah's whale in DARK•HERITAGE is a weird Cthulhoid monstrosity, and Jonah comes back from the experience insane and both disturbed and disturbing.

I'm a little leery of nearly naked warrior babes—they're not very realistic.  On the other hand, they are nearly naked warrior babes, and the attraction of that idea speaks for itself.  But put one on a dinosaur, and you really can't go wrong.  I really should use more dinosaurs in general.

This is such a great image, but I'm really not quite sure what it is.  Probably a very specific need on a very specific AD ASTRA planet, where mechanical stilts are a necessity because of hazards at ground level.

The "Chaos Warrior" archetype as a kind of iterative variant on the barbarian is relatively new, but realtively common nowadays too.  The stitches running down his chest and across one pec also make me wonder if this isn't actually a flesh golem of some kind.  Wouldn't Frankenstein have been a lot cooler if he'd made the monster look like this?  Well, in TIMISCHBURG, he does!  The CULT OF UNDEATH Beast of the Ebenbach Road is probably one of these.

Although most of my settings are more northern European than southern European, I do feel the need to make sure and give shout-outs to classical mythology too.  Plus, I have really fond memories of the Harryhausen Clash of the Titans from when I was a kid, so crossing the River Styx in Charon's boat just feels right somehow.

Women are trouble.  Every single one of them.  It's not a question of whether or not they're trouble, it's a question of 1) are they hot enough that you can forgive them for the inevitable trouble that they'll cause you, or 2) are they worth the trouble?

This particular exotic example is hotter than most, but also a lot more trouble than a nice local girl next door.  Verdict: not worth the trouble.  Be very careful in Nizrekh.  The women are beautiful but deadly.

Well, well well... if it isn't another Magnus Robot Fighter.  I've already discussed how he'd fit into AD ASTRA when I posed a different picture of him.

I've always been a huge fan of 1) Wayne Reynolds, and 2) demons and devils in D&D.  They are a strange mesh, in many ways, of classic Judeo-Christian folklore (not doctrine per se; most of the demonological stuff falls more firmly in the realm of folklore), classical mythology (check out, again, Charon—illustrated in both of these images, as it happens) and Lovecraftian weirdness.

Daemons in FANTASY HACK are a mesh of the same basic elements.  The big nasty leaders of the daemons are beyond the ken of being worth statting (with the exception of Cthulhu himself, and that's mostly just as a point of reference) but the spectrum that I do have statted, from imps and servitors, through the nosoi, typhons and baal-rog are not meant to be exhaustive.  There's always room for more types of daemons.

I don't know why I prefer the British spelling of that word, to be honest.  Daemons is how you type it in Warhammer, but of course, that's a British game.  Daemons also exist in D&D, although they're certainly not nearly as popular or iconic as the demons and devils themselves.  Because the splitting of them into those categories is essentially an artifact of making them personifications of alignment nodes, I don't have any need or desire to have more than one kind of "fiend", and daemon just seemed like a word that had less baggage then the alternatives.

In this regard, it's a little unusual; I did have a few latent British habits, probably from reading so much Tolkien over and over again as a kid (until recently I was probably more likely to type grey than gray), but in recent years I've learned to stop being afraid to embrace my natural jingoism and K-selected in-grouping, and one minor side-effect of that is that I almost always choose an American spelling over a British one now, no matter the context—even in fantasy, where British spellings give you that Merry Olde Englande feel or whatever.  So, daemon is just the exception that proves the rule, or something.