Friday Art Attack

Another Friday!  Another week without much in the way of posting, and what there is is significantly weighted towards Indo-European stuff (and... I've got another one for later today in the works.  Oh, well.)  I am however, not entirely RPG-less; I'm actually reading Paizo's Distant Realms books as we speak, which spells out a number of extraplanar cities.  The first ones aren't particularly fascinating, but I'm hoping that some of the locations and characters are worth reading about.  Also; I haven't seen Endgame yet, and I won't tonight either, but my son will, and the whole famn damily has tickets for tomorrow afternoon.  Rumors—relatively respectable ones that I trust—are that the movie is really quite good, but that the "set up" if you want to call it that for the next phase is pretty dismal, and it looks quite a bit like the message of the next phase will be something along the lines of "white people, if you submit and admit the ascendancy of the brown coalition, we'll allow you to die out with some dignity as we replace you in your own homelands and your own cultural institutions."  Maybe it shouldn't be very surprising that a corporation as fundamentally and thoroughly evil as Disney is gradually ruining Marvel the same way that they rapidly ruined Star Wars, but rather it's surprising that they didn't do it faster and sooner.  Anyhoo, by the time I have anything to say about it based on actual personal experience when I blog again after the weekend, it'll be old news.  But I'll almost certainly do it anyway.  I mean, heck—I've long been reviewing D&D books that had been out for years back when book reviews were a more regular part of my post rotation (and if I do them now, it's after two additional editions have come out—not that I'm likely to anymore.)

Anyway, later today, like I said, I'll post a discussion on "the origin of whiteness"—as a phenotype, specifically.  And early on Monday I'll talk about Endgame.  That'll keep me occupied most likely, but if something else comes up that I want to post about, maybe I will.  With that; on to the Friday Art!  UPDATE:  Eh, no I probably won't do that post.  Too complicated.  I've got literally dozens of haplogroup distribution maps, and I have to make sense of all of them before I can start to draw correlations because the phenotypes associated with "whiteness" and the genetic clusters.

Graz'zt, in his 5e form.  Graz'zt is a unique D&D character, of course, but he's also not.  As the embodiment of the Black Man of the Woods (mentioned by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter), the Black Man of the Crossroads from hoodoo lore, and even Nyarlathotep from Yog-Sothothery.  He's a fairly typical representation of the Devil, honestly.

A combination of eastern Iroquois and Algonquin savages with some romanticized notions of early Europe give us this barbarian.

This was the cover to a rather mediocre Eberron novel, if I remember correctly (actually, that's probably not really fair.  I'm pretty sure it was among the best in that series.)

Another great Wayne Reynolds "Indiana Jones in D&D" style painting.  I think this was a Dragon or Dungeon Magazine cover, but I could be misremembering that.)

I'm not quite sure what's going on in this picture.  It might actually be the D&D version of Koschei (although they transliterate that much more difficult in D&D for reasons that I can't quite fathom, with all kinds of gratuitous yet unpronounceable consonants clustered together.)

Sigh.  The future we didn't get, sadly.

A Viking (with an ornamental boar on his helmet no less!, no doubt based on the historical Anglo-Saxon Benty Grange helmet, or various other Celtic helmets that had similar crests) fighting some kind of forest monster.  In Dark•Heritage, that would almost certainly be a thurse.

I'm not quite sure when undead and pirates become so closely affiliated, but they are, and it works remarkably well.  Even Disney couldn't completely screw that up when they gave us undead and pirates.

Some James Ryman art from an old Dungeon Magazine.  If I recall correctly, that monster is a barghest.

Cosplaying a Bronze Age Mycenean warrior.

Dis, from the book I mentioned above that I'm reading.

If you've ever been to an "art" museum, unless it's an old school European one, it probably doesn't show you real art like this, but instead something idiotic like Andy Warhol.

Warfare in the Bronze Age must have been a pretty grim business.