Friday Art Attack

While I'm among those who isn't a huge fan of "anime-style" art in fantasy, this picture of Iggwilv and Graz'zt isn't bad.  Plus, I tried to be a completist when it came to Graz'zt art, given that I based the look of my kemling race pretty heavily on them.

Then again, what is Graz'zt but Nightcrawler of the X-men combined with Darth Maul, at least visually?

I've also long been a fan of the "savage races" of fantasy, and given that hobgoblins in particular were supposed to be lawful, I never understood why they weren't supposed to have had militarily successful, yet presumably tyrannical, highly developed and civilized empires.  So, I tend to grab a lot of savage humanoid art, especially when they're more (rather than less) anthropomorphized.

This guy, on the other hand, is a much less anthropomorphized version of a savage humanoid, with a much higher emphasis on the savage.

This orc is also highly non-anthropomorphized, with an almost gorilla-like face.  Yet somehow, the orc serving lass just looks like a green-skinned anime girl.

An interesting and savage take on the ghoul.  I had thought maybe I'd used this in the past, but it's not in my used folder, so I guess not...

Same thing with this one, although maybe I've used other art of this same less iconic Iconic character by Paizo.  The Red Raven, the swashbuckling Zorro-like figure of their ersatz French Revolution country, Galt, is an interesting character, in spite of the cliche.

Dark Ages Greeks fighting against Phoenician or other Levantine people.  Curiously, PCAs of sampled cemeteries from Mycenean Age Greeks are not notably different from those of samples from pre-Greek Minoan Aegean, so the Greeks themselves came in originally relatively small numbers, spread their language and culture via elite dominance, and superimposed themselves on a fundamentally alien population.  This is not what happened in some other areas; in Iberia, for example, when the Bell Beakers arrived (roughly similar in time to the "Coming of the Greeks" they replaced almost 100% the male Y-DNA lineages already there (although they then seemed to have taken local girls to wife, based on the genetics of subsequent generations.)  In Great Britain, they replaced 90% of the entire genetic package, so they didn't even take local girls; they seem to have brought their own and just replaced the people entirely.

Even in India there was substantial genetic admixture, but Anatolia and the Aegean seem to have suffered relatively little of it with the coming of the Indo-Europeans.  I wonder, though, if we could sample the Greek aristocracy from early after the arrival, if we'd have a much more northern/eastern European phenotype.  I strongly suspect that we would.  Literature from the period seems to suggest as much very strongly as well.  I also wonder if some of the iconic city-states like Sparta may well have had an Indo-European rather than local Mediterranean phenotype until fairly well into history.

This orc shaman isn't very anthropomorphic at all either, and clearly is meant to look like an ape.

This champion, on the other hand, looks like a green-painted human barbarian with slightly pointy ears.

Undead and snakes with an Egyptian flavor.  Always a good combination. Just ask Indiana Jones!

Another Wayne Reynolds undead sorcerer of some kind or other.

And another Mycenean Age Greek warrior, here showing a significantly Yamnaya-like phenotype.  As an aside, I'm still quite skeptical of the notion that the Yamnaya were significantly darker than the Corded Ware, given that the Corded Ware were over 75% Yamnaya by PCA.  Plus, if they picked up all of that blond hair and blue eyes from native Scandinavian and Eastern Hunter Gatherers that made up the remaining 25% or so of their genome, yet the blond hair and blue eyes phenotypes tend to be recessive, how did that even happen?  Rapid mutation after the Yamnaya became Corded Ware over the course of just a few generations?  I doubt it.  The Yamnaya were probably considerably fairer than they are often given credit for, and if we think that they weren't because of a few samples that showed darker hair and eyes and even skin, to a great degree, then we probably have a sampling bias of some sort, plus a lack of sufficient samples to give us the full picture of the population anyway.  Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to revert back to some "pure-blooded Nordic" phenotype for the Yamnaya or anything like that, but I am suggesting that they brought with them markers that led to significantly fairer skin, hair and eyes everywhere they went, except possibly the general region of Fennoscandia and Baltic and North Sea coasts where the locals already had similar physical features.  Much is made of the fact that the Baltic is the highest incidence of blue eyes and blond hair today, rather than the Ukrainian and southern Russian steppes, but that region has been washed over—historically even—with wave after wave of Eastern invaders: Huns, Avars, many groups of Turks and Mongols, etc.  It's not difficult to explain small changes in phenotype without having to invoke a statistically unlikely explanation of dark Yamnaya people having almost entirely fairer descendants.

The Lord of Blades from Eberron 4e's cover, by Wayne Reynolds.  And some kind of Giger-esque alien/construct wolf/dog or whatever.  I'm not sure what those are (steel panthers, maybe?)

A cool demon image.

Aryan (Andronovo) invaders on the northern portions of what is now India/Pakistan or the Iranian region from the Middle/Late Bronze Age.  If you think those Andronovo guys look an awful lot like early Celtic chariot warriors, except in the desert, and with Nazi iconography, well, yes... They do.  There are historical reasons for that, actually.