Friday Art Attack

Since Halloween is nearly upon us, here's a bunch of art that heavily features undead.  It actually heavily features Warhammer undead illustrations, especially, the wonderful new (well, newish) Nighthaunts stuff. I may yet talk about the Nighthaunts and how they can be used in a game of DH5, or any other FRPG, for that matter.  I think ghosts (and I mean this is the broader sense that includes any ghost-like creature) are woefully under-used in FRPGs.  Part of that may be that they are somewhat one-dimensional mechanically, and in D&D, you can't really fight them very well, so you just have the cleric turn them. Bo-o-o-o-r-i-i-i-i-i-n-g.  This is a real shame, though.  If you think of the Lord of the Rings as one of the most seminal works of fantasy ever published, you'll remember, of course, that the entirety of Book I, so 1/6 of the entire work, has the hobbits being pursued by the Ringwraiths, which are nothing more than a very particular set of ghosts.  They also turn up later in the work, of course, but the point I'm making is that ghost stories are an important part of fantasy, but a perhaps less important part of FRPGs.  I'll noodle around ways in which I think maybe that can be changed, especially for this time of year, when such thoughts naturally come to mind.  But first, here's the art:

This is one of the character-types from the Nighthaunt army; a kind of mounted grim reaper with corpse candles on a rotted, ghostly horse with bat wings.

One must always keep in mind that it's our heritage of love the expansive forests of northern Europe and North America, but forests were also traditionally a place of fear; one could easily get lost, and they were full of potentially dangerous wild animals and bandits and worse.  There's a reason why in mythology and folklore crossing through a forest was often the place where the characters went to find danger.

This is a very interesting take on the lich archetype; a skeletal sorcerer surrounded by undead that... have halos around their heads?  I dunno.  Nice artwork, even if' it's strange.

A balrog, or some FRPGs equivalent, perhaps.  While it's one of Tolkien's most oft-imitated creations, it really was kind of woefully under-used.

The queen of the dead in the new Nighthaunts army.

A more subtle interpretation of a ghost story.  I like it.

A... not very subtle take on the undead.  Ah, well.  Sometimes subtlety is over-rated.

Another one of the Warhammer ghosts.

Do I really need to say what everything is?  Something like this stands on its own merits, I think.

Speaking of not subtle, here's one of the Warhammer vampires; a Blood Dragon, I think, which are the martial vampires, and who they always clad in this weird striated red armor.

Every once in a while, it's nice to remember that classic art really blows away most of what our modern in-your-face commercialized art is able to produce.  We truly are a fallen society, unable to even successfully mimic the masters of the past very well, much less create new material to the same level.

Not that I don't think we have painters who are technically capable of producing stuff like this. I just don't think that they would.

I don't often post miniatures, but here's a few nice ones from the undead themed armies.  The first one is a whole unit of ghosts, which is an artifact, of course, of how Warhammer works, but the miniatures themselves are quite nice (and creating a ghost miniature that actually looks like a classic ghost is really quite an accomplishment, if you think about it.)  The next one, with a weird vampire queen lady who looks like a parody of some kind is weird, but the ghosts are great, and a giant cauldron of blood is, of course, always pretty cool.  The last miniature is a terrorgheist, whatever exactly that means, but it was more or less the inspiration for my fell ghast stats.  A big undead dragon-ish thing; there's only so many ways to slice that kind of thing.