Monsters and villains

I meant to write up some follow-up to my 5x5 front post; I don't actually have a 5x5 yet, just the top title row labels; one of the axes. I need to go fill in all of the actual 5 events that would go with each of those 5 fronts, now.

But, rather than do so, I've still been messing around with Hero Forge and doing the Nightlife Event on Nar Shaddaa (I got the space tommy gun, which wasn't terribly hard, but which I really wanted because holy cow, it's a space tommy gun.)

Many of the new Hero Forge characters I've made are not ones that I've made at all; they're ones that I've found in the Community Library, copied to my own personal library, and then I've seen if I needed to make any changes to them to make them fit in the Dark Fantasy X setting. I ended up taking a bunch of stuff, including the Hunger Cultists that I've showed before, and deciding that that's the look of my Tazitta Death Cults after all. I had vaguely imagined that they painted themselves black with soot or tar, and then made white or whitish body art on top of that to make themselves look like skeletons, but not only can I not do that in Hero Forge, but it's not really that cool anyway.

Now, granted, all cultists kind of look alike in Hero Forge, because there aren't a lot of mask options available yet, but I like the way that whomever it was who designed the main look of Hunger cult color scheme made it work out. I had a totally different cultist that I'd grabbed from someone else, and later it occurred to me that since it had already the same hood, same mask and same fringe from their coat or robe or whatever, that it looked almost identical except in a more predictable black color scheme. The brownish-gray is really unique.

So, I turned that other cultist into another example of a Tazitta Death cultist, with a slightly different outfit. Then I made a "boss" character and a prophetess character from scratch to flesh out the cult a bit.

I also poked around looking for skaven models and I found some that I like. My own ratmen aren't exactly skaven, but let's be honest; they're not that different either.

So, these images actually do kind of help with my 5x5 given that the Tazitta Death cult is one of the 5 as is the ratmen plague up in the north.

Regardless, they're just cool images so I couldn't resist them. And here's a few other villains thrown in for good measure, and even a new take on Revecca. My own creation just didn't make her pretty enough, and when I saw this one while looking for something else, it seemed to me that with only a few minor changes, it was a better fit than  the one I'd worked up.

This is a very dynamic pose, and honestly, I liked this render for that as much as for any other reason. The guy is clearly not quite human, with his snake-eyes, but I like the idea of unusual or even one-off demihumans as NPCs in the setting. Snake cultists make sense to me.

I'm a big and oft-declared fan of grounded villains, not always crazy monsters and sorcerers and weirdos. Sometimes you need a really good assassin or bounty hunter to really show the PCs a little humility.

I'm not quite sure how to create miniatures without legs who float above the base. Obviously you can't actually print them in a 3D printer. But you can make digital models of them, at least if you start with someone else's digital model and then just go change everything.

These various interpretations of ghouls probably can't all fit in the same setting at the same time, because they're too different. But, they're all cool nonetheless, so I'm not going to worry at least right now that they're all obviously not the same thing. I've got plenty of undead interpretations to use.

An ifrit. I just really wanted to do something even more unusual with the floating ghost idea.

Not actually a villain. Because orcs and goblins exist in many other settings, but my other demihuman races do not, I have a lot of them because I could get them without having to build them from scratch. Many of them I have built from the ground up, but many are copied than modified to fit my vision of the orcling races, which is significantly less monstrous than what most settings have done.

I was a little bit surprised to find that there was only one rat ogre miniature that I could find in the community library, and it wasn't very good. I had to make this rat brute pretty much from scratch. I also like the more grounded, old school rat ogres that Games Workshop used to do, as opposed to the newer, super crazy fantasy cyperpunk looking ones. I'm not really a huge fan of what the rat people faces look like in Hero Forge, but until the face customizer and the kitbashing stuff launches later this year, that's all that we've got to work with.

A poison dagger wielding skaven assassin makes a good basic ratman for my setting.

This one, on the other hand, is a named character, and he's too over-the-top for me. Plus, the warpstone is such a Warhammer specific idea that I can't really condone it for any other setting. But it's a very well made mini, so I copied it anyway.

This slightly modified gutter runner is an even better "basic" ratman.

I love the dramatic lighting on this ratman sage, or engineer, or whatever; he's up to no good at all, and could well be the "boss" that needs to be defeated in the ratman column of the 5x5.

Prettier Revecca. Looking a little more anxious after the death of her father. She's only 16 after all, when she first appears as an NPC to be interacted with!

The Tazitta cult "boss" built from scratch.

The guy who was some other kind of cultist who I changed his color palette and then he was already a ready-made Tazitta Death cultist variant.

The Tazitta Death Cult prophetess. She's supposed to be attractive; that is, if she hadn't shaved her head, put on a mask that's half skull half old-school Jason hockey mask, and wasn't covered in blood and holding a fresh human heart in one hand.

The original Tazitta death cult models; which were called Hunger Cultists when I found them in the community library.

My first take on a thurse made him look like a bigger and more savage orc; this one makes him look much more like a Warhammer beastman. Which, way back when when I decided to use the word thurse, was pretty much what I had initially envisioned them as.

I had a werewolf model, but I didn't love it, so I found one in the library and then really went to town changing it. I still don't love it, though. Whatever. I don't need werewolf art like I need kemling or jann art. Plenty of other people have already made good art of werewolves that I can totally repurpose.

Various takes on the concept of the wight. They all look significantly different to each other, and some of them don't look that different to some of the ghoul concepts. Which is fine. I like making undead more mysterious rather than sticking them in a bunch of compartments in a box like they're fishing lures, or something. Undead are fundamentally unnatural, not neat categories.

Speaking of which, I liked this idea for a wraith. It's more a case of playing around with various colors than it is doing anything really unusual with the digital sculpt, but it looks already more Ringwraithy than some of the Ringwraith interpretations I found in the community library. I did make a few changes to what I found, but not many.