Some Angus McBride

I really like Angus McBride's historical artwork.  It's simply not been matched in the literature since his passing.  I thought I'd pick a few of his pieces and relate them to potential usages in DH5.

Keep in mind that I'm mostly treating Timischburg as if it were a Medieval fantasy version of a Bram Stoker-esque Transylvania.  It's made up of a population of Balkan-like peasants and an Austrian-like aristocracy; early Middle Ages in style.  As a nod to the earlier history of the area, some of the peasants militia, banditry or backcountry bravos may be somewhat Dacian-like in their accoutrements; including fighting with a falx and those kind of pointed Dacian helmets that were pictured on Trajan's column.

Country noble in Timischburg with his retinue

Timischer royals

Backcountry bandit chieftain and his men

The Hill Country, on the other hand, is meant to be more chaotic, more multi-ethnic, and more frontier-like.  I envision not only peoples that resemble Celts or Gauls but also people who resemble Germanic, Frankish, Viking, Anglo-Saxon, etc. peoples as well.  And those are the protagonist peoples; there will also be "demihuman" peoples as well as maybe red Injun type.  Maybe some "higher civilization" can be rump state Roman-like; kind of like Roman Britain after the Empire officially withdrew, but the locals still had a hybrid Romano-Celtic culture.

Granted; DH5 is a fantasy setting, and it's not necessarily meant to be historical too much.  Which means that I won't find Angus McBride artwork for everything that exists in DH5.  Rather, I'm attempting to use some existing Angus McBride stuff and find a way to work them in because I like them.

Soldiers of the Hill Country

King of one of the Hill Country city-states at the site of an expansion fort

Leftover nobles from the people before the Hill Country founding

Mercenary charter

More Hill Country soldiers

Hill Country countryside noble with his troops

Two Rival Hill Country groups greeting each other

"Wild" Hill Country warriors

Hill Country bandit warriors

Following a skirmish in the Hill Country

Finally, I've been using a cropped version of this picture of Valaris for quite some time to represent myself as Desdichado as an avatar, which was—of course—a nom de plume Ivanhoe used at the lists of Ashby.  Ivanhoe wasn't exactly like Valaris, and the armor and weapons are centuries apart in terms of development; the Gothic War between the Ostrogothic Italian kingdom and the Byzantines in the 6th century AD and the Third Crusader period in England in the late 12th century AD are, of course, far apart from each other in both time and space.

So not only is Valaris potentially a poor stand-in for Ivanhoe, but Ivanhoe isn't a very accurate representation of me either, although I do like 1) the association Sir Walter Scott made between Ivanhoe and one who has been deliberately disinherited by a hostile, alien race, and 2) his close association with the English nation as it was in the process of becoming as the Normans and Saxons were eventually merged.

But of course, I have much darker brown hair (now getting a bit grayish), green eyes and I'm not in the kind of shape that either Ivanhoe or Valaris would have been in.  But still; one is a historical champion of a southern branch of my people, and one is a fictional champion of my actual people.  Why not use the image?