[Wids]

So a few hours back, while Corella was busy handing a freshly Turned Zombie Warrior a holy beatdown in the swamps west of Thasselen, my Internet Service Provider suddenly decided to remind me of how crappy they are by dropping my connection. So after several minutes of hitting my modem and my router with a hammer, desperate to resume Corella's undead-bashing as I was, I decided to grab some drawing paper and my pencils, then I started putting my most recent NWN screenshots to good use.

I ended up pinching out this:

(Yes, it's a clickie.)

Props again to Unia for figuring out that Corella always lies and always says the opposite of what she means, Bizarro World style. (Of course, that's only if Corella likes you; that way, you might actually catch on and figure out what she means. If you're her enemy or she's otherwise feeling antagonistic for whatever reason, she'll tell the truth here and there, just to throw you off. Because deceivers have a way of using honesty as a tool for further deceit, that's why. "Tell me where you hid the Third Book of Cyric, damn you!" "Well, I most certainly didn't leave it in that oubliette down the hall. That's where they keep the owlbears." "Aha! We have it now, boys! Into the oubliette!" RAWWRRRR!!! Chomp chomp chew chew AIEEEEE!!! "...well, now I'm deeply saddened that those fine, upstanding Cyricists didn't listen to me.")

And sure, the Chair Leg of Truth has character and it's not without its charms (and compliments to Spider Jerusalem for coming up with that name). But I should probably dig up something better for Corella. I mean, I invested in Martial Weapons Proficiency and she's wielding a club? Yeah, I should probably fix that. With the Gold Corella has saved up, it would be a simple enough matter to fix, except that no two sources on the internet agree on what Leira's Favored Weapon is. Is it a kukri? Is it a rapier? Is it a flail? Is it a longsword? No one seems to know for certain.

>_>

<_<

The Goddess of Deception strikes again! O_O

Anyway, behold the power of boredom! More shall surely come. I think I'll tackle Eilbren next.

So what have you doodled lately?

[Wids]

I miss this thread. Do you miss this thread? Great! Let's add more filler to it. :D

(Clickie)

We all know Fenriloftheice, right? Well, over on Andrune, my character, Wenderlee Varton, a Disciple of the White Rod (Loviatar's monks, for those who don't know) used to torment Fenril's character, Melinda Davis (a wizard and yet another one of those werewolves that Fenril loves so much), just by emotionally jarring Melinda in various ways and laughing at Melinda's squirming and stammering. Because monks pwn wizards in all ways, as we all know. Plus, Loviatans are jerks. Naturally, I had to doodle it and splatter it on the Andrune forums. Even Fenril admitted that this was 100% accurate. :P

Bai Shan Jingshen, my banshee caliban (and yet another monk...nun...whatever) from Prisoners of the Mists, way back when. Seriously, what's with me and all the scantily clad monk women? I should probably get my head checked.

Serrica Thallys (my cleric of Umberlee from Pirate Isles) killing Podarge (harpy queen, priestess of Ardat the Unavowed and desecrator of an Umberlant shrine, which was a pretty surefire way to get on Serrica's bad side). Then Serrica raised a bunch of undead and moved the defiled Umberlant shrine from Prespur's South Beach to Umberlee's Shoal, fighting off wave after wave of harpies every step of the way. It was one hell of a DM event. Serrica eventually made it to Level 17 on a server where characters weren't expected to make it beyond Level 12, and she ended up building a huge temple around that shrine, so her game was pretty tight, yo. I'm hoping that Corella becomes just as awesome as Serrica was.

And I couldn't just type Serrica's big plan and send it to the DMs, oh no...

I'm excessive like that sometimes.

And somehow, a DM sending me a Tell about Serrica being crazy enough to surf a tsunami turned into this:

Yeah.

Anyway, speaking of sketches, I should probably finish up my latest sketch and get Corella's backstory topic rolling again, shouldn't I? I should finish the Liber Transfiguratus while I'm at it....

So who else doodles stuff? Don't leave me hanging here.

[Bertram Anders]

I can make a decent stick figure.

[Wids]

Like this? :D

[Bertram Anders]

That reminds me of some of my rogues old nefarious plots in PnP.

[Animayhem]

Well done

[Wids]

That reminds me of some of my rogues old nefarious plots in PnP.

Serrica was one of the bastard children of a pirate captain, so she was a scheming, nefarious sort too. Roguishness is as roguishness does. ;)

Well done

Love you too. :)


I'm also Dungeon-Mastering a play-by-forum campaign on a forum which my old Air Force buddy Dobie co-admins, and one of the overarching things in that campaign is a book titled The Cold Womb: Al-Shadan's Journal on the Undead. The Cold Womb was written almost a century past by Yurel ben al-Shadan, a Paladin of Pelor who spent almost all of his life fighting the undead, then committed everything he had learned about the undead to writing shortly before he finally succumbed to old age. He wrote only five copies of the Cold Womb before he died, but no intact copies of the Cold Womb are known to exist; either they fell into the hands of Al-Shadan's enemies (and were destroyed), fell apart from age and maltreatment, or were picked apart by researchers and collectors.

So now the player-characters may happen across pages of the Cold Womb during the course of their adventures (and as they're still in their prologue chapters, the PCs haven't actually met each other yet). So far, they've found the Foreword and three entries: The Skeleton, The Slaymate and The Deathlock.

Who knows what may happen if they should gather all the pages and come up with a complete copy of The Cold Womb?

Yurel ben al-Shadan, Paladin of Pelor, as depicted in the Foreword.




The Skeleton




The Slaymate




The Deathlock

(Dobie's forums have a black background. The pics look much better on a black background, believe me.)

And there are 60-something entries in The Cold Womb, too. I'm going to have a lot of doodling ahead of me before that campaign's over....

[Wids]

Zaniya Lir'oolsi, my Twi'lek Bounty Hunter from NWN's bygone Star Wars: Rise of the Rebellion server, as doodled from this in-game screenshot:

Zaniya's allegiance was with the Commerce Guild, which was a neutral faction with enough political, technological and financial power to rival the Galactic Empire (which is exactly why Darth Vader ended up going ballistic and wiping them out in the Star Wars extended universe). Despite this and the benefits of neutrality, however, the DMs and the players alike were so engrossed in both the Empire and the Rebel Alliance that they pretty well ignored the neutral factions. Too bad for them and their myopia; PCs from the neutral factions would have made ideal mercenaries, negotiators, war profiteers and/or double agents, but nobody thought to play up to this. So aside from one episode where a bunch of Rebels were trying to break into an Imperial base, one of them thought to sign a contract with Zaniya, the party ran into a time bomb and it just so happened that Zaniya was the only one who could defuse it...well, Zaniya never got invited to join in anyone else's reindeer games. So she ended up soloing a lot of adventures and running a lot of trades between star systems, alas.

(Yeah, I definitely drew her torso a little bit long-ish there. I'm still kicking myself over that.)

Pic linked here
on account of its likely Not Safe for Workness. By the way, these forums could use a Spoiler code.

Miranda Lassiter, my first (and so far only) player-character from the New World of Darkness tabletop RPG, Promethean: The Created. I thought to illustrate her origins and backstory for my Deviant Art account, and the Promethean universe itself complicates things. Even though each new Promethean is a blank slate as soon as he, she or it is reanimated, sometimes, the Promethean glimpses, employs skills from or goes through the motions of latent memories from the Promethean's pre-mortem past. This is bad enough for most Lineages (ie. Galateids, Tammuz, Osirans, et cetera) -- each of whom are built and reanimated from a single corpse -- but it gets downright staggering for Frankensteins, who are built and reanimated from several corpses. More than one Frankenstein has slipped into deep neurosis from remembering conflicting histories or hearing a cacophony of X many voices inside his or her head.

I have a doodle of a fully clothed Miranda around here somewhere. After her Demiurge (her creator, in Promethean parlance) was so overwhelmed with what he had done -- and what he had created -- that he shot himself in the head and left Miranda all alone in the world, Miranda went to clothe herself. But Frankensteins are normally much larger than your average human being, and Miranda is no exception; she stands 7' 4" and weighs close to 300 pounds even when naked, so she couldn't find any clothing that would fit her. So she ended up cutting up several pants, lab coats and other articles of clothing, then stitching them all together. So it's pretty fitting that her clothing's unusually large and crudely stitched together from several sources, just like she herself is.

(Yes, that's not a mistake: Miranda has two navels. Like all Prometheans, she exists as a mockery of birth and life. So that fits too.)

One of my characters from Changeling: The Dreaming, a tabletop RPG from the Classic World of Darkness. Changeling revolves around characters who, though born to mortals, are descended from the faeries of old: Sidhe, trolls, redcaps, satyrs and so on. And every now and then, one of those descendants awakens and becomes a creature with two identities and two lives: One mortal, one fae. And they have to find their ways through the modern world, where mass disbelief and the suppression of imagination (and all the Banality which comes with that) threaten the changeling's very existence at every turn.

As a mortal, she's Mary O'Foghlahd, a plucky girl from Cork County, Ireland. As a fae, she's Mary O'Knickers, a roguish and free-spirited Pooka. As each pooka resembles a mixture of a faerie and an animal of whatever sort the pooka's attuned to, Mary O'Knickers is a humanoid, brownie-like faerie from the waist up and a common brown rat from the waist down. Her fae ancestors earned the name of her lineage when they stole the knickers right off a sidhe queen while she was wearing them, and Mary's not far removed from such dashing rascality.

When she calls on the Wyrd (and thus manifests as a faerie in the mortal realm), she's a dead-eye shot with her Celtic bow and she's compelled to always speak in rhyme. Her clothing (tailored and enchanted to accommodate her transformations) is already outlandish enough when she's Mary O'Foghlahd, but it becomes an outfit straight out of Wonderland as soon as she turns into Mary O'Knickers. Of course, other changelings always see her as Mary O'Knickers; the only time they don't is when Banality drowns her fae self, resulting in the temporary (or, if it happens too many times, permanent) death of her fae half.

Changeling: The Dreaming will screw with your mind. The whole game is one big identity crisis. I love it. :)

(I know...I forgot to draw the wall's kickboard in the mirror. I really should go back and fix that.)

I don't limit myself to White Wolf's World of Darkness games. Another RPG which I've played and run a few times in the past? In Nomine, from Steve Jackson Games. It was originally named "In Nomine Satanis", but SJG shortened it to "In Nomine," supposedly to accommodate the game's flexibility; you can run an all-Heavenly campaign, an all-Infernal campaign or, for a challenge, a campaign where players can play characters from both sides. So if you want "In Nomine" to be short for "In Nomine Satanis," that's fine. If you think it stands for "In Nomine Patri et Filii et Spiritu Sancti," that's fine too. ;)

In Nomine takes place in the modern world (again), and the war between Heaven and Hell is still being fought on Earth. In recent centuries (and unbeknownst to the forces of Hell), God Almighty mysteriously disappeared from the universe and did so well at disappearing that all the angels of the Heavenly Host can't find him. Around that same time, unbeknownst to the Host, Lucifer disappeared from all Creation as well. So now, the Archangels are running Heaven and orchestrating their side of the war as well as they can in God's absence, the Princes of Hell are running Hell and orchestrating their side of the war in Lucifer's absence, and the whole mess has evolved into a shadow war on Earth, with angels and demons masquerading as mortals in order to carry out their agendas, recruit or seduce mortals to their respective sides and eventually guide all the world into either salvation or damnation.

For the "races" of In Nomine's characters, there are seven Choirs of angels, seven Bands of demons and a few varieties of deputized mortals; Mortals enlisted into Heaven's cause become either Saints or Soldiers of God, while mortals enlisted into Hell's cause become either Sorcerers or Soldiers of Hell. The forces of Hell also have Undead characters such as Mummies, Vampires or Zombies to offer.

Pound for pound, Celestials (angels and demons) tend to be more powerful than mortals. But angels and demons also carry the risk of causing disturbances in the Symphony (the underlying order behind all of God's Creation), which can bring a whole lot of unwanted attention down on the offending Celestial's head. A demon who goes shooting up a shopping mall will shatter the local Symphony by doing so and can expect several squads of angels and/or rival demons to show up shortly after and try to kick his ass, while a mortal (who exists as part of the Symphony and not outside it) who does the same thing won't even cause a ripple in the Symphony. Thus, both the angels and the demons find plenty of use for mortal pawns as they endlessly strive to stick it to the other team.

(There are also minor demons (Imps and Gremlins) and minor angels (Relievers). But players don't get to play those. I included them in the doodle anyway.)

But a noteworthy system in In Nomine involves the Celestials switching sides from time to time. Angels who act against their Heavenly nature one too many times will Fall and join the forces of Hell, while demons who act against their Infernal nature will be Redeemed and join the forces of Heaven. With the exceptions of the Malakim (Heaven's black-winged warrior angels who simply never Fall) and the Lilim (the daughters of Lilith and masters of authoring Infernal contracts), each Choir has a corresponding Band.

And there lie the roots of this doodle (which I drew in an unusually "cutesy" style). Regarding celestial appearances, each Choir or Band has certain similarities to its corresponding opposite: In their Celestial forms, a Seraph and a Balseraph both have mystic, serpentine appearances and many eyes, a Mercurian and an Impudite both resemble mortals with karma-appropriate wings and haloes, et cetera. But the one exception is the pairing between Ofanim (the Wheels, who can race across Creation at the speed of thought) and Calabim (the Destroyers, who are entropy incarnate and can destroy anything with a touch). Fiery wheels have absolutely no resemblance to bat-winged monster-demons, so I never understood why a Falling Ofanite or a Redeemed Calabite should make such a drastic change in appearance.

(I even included In Nomine's symbolic hallmark -- a burning white feather -- in the doodle. See it? ;) )

An unfinished doodle of Antinidia and Bitarosiel, c/o my House of Ainsley campaign. Antinidia was a drow elf necromancer (who used his "day job" as an undertaker to avert suspicion from the surface-dwellers), and Bitarosiel was an erinyes who served as Antinidia's foil in a love/hate relationship of sorts. But then Antinidia's player dropped out of the campaign for personal reasons, and it doesn't look like he's coming back. So Antinidia's gone and Bitarosiel's in limbo. I might bring the erinyes and her arcane trumpet back to complicate matters for one or more of the remaining PCs later down the road, though. I haven't decided yet.

That's all for now. So what have you sketched lately?

[TheShadowEntity]

This is my Half-Shadowdragon PC from another server Ne'Sekoleth.
The picture was generously drawn for me by my friend Elgate who is far better at art then i am :)


Cannon Image of Ne'Sekoleth (Thank you Elgate!)

Race: Half-Shadowdragon Half-Human
Gender: Male
Surname: Ra'Van'ne
Relations: Formally Married to Ronja Ra'Van'ne (Believed Deceased) / Currently Mated to Lia Ra'Van'Ne


Ne'Sekoleth has lived most of his life in the wilds and still cant seem to grasp most human cultural traits. He was born on the plane of shadow to a human mother; a paliden who had become separated from her crusade into that plane. Ne's childhood was spent on the shadowplane until his early teens when his mother took her chance at escape, and could not bear to abandon her only child to become another creature of darkness.

Ne spent the next few years near the farms of Tivook where stories of a strange "shadowdemon" who stole chickens and small livestock became increasingly common. It was on his 17th year that the farmers finaly rooted him out and chased him into the vicinity of the Tivook Inn where he first met the Priestess Charia.

Over the next year Ne began to learn the basics of human culture and become tolerated by many locals in the region under the guidance and protection of Charia. It was only then that he began to speak common with any real affinity. Over time it became clear that Ne had begun to feel affections for his mentor and was devastated to find them left unreciprocated. It was after several months that he began to seek love elsewhere eventually finding the local barmaid Ronja Ravensfield willing to give him the chance at courtship he desired. The following relationship was long but littered with pitfalls, the largest of them being the concept of "marriage" to which Ne did not fully comprehend the rituals to and insisted for a time that ronja should simply be his mate. He eventually gave way however and due to his not being allowed in the city had the wedding held in tivook in the wilderness.

The happiness was not to last however, Ronja vanished one night leaving only a horrific note describing herself having fallen victim to a plague and having to leave seeking a cure as her explanation. Many took this note to be fake and Ne was looked upon with suspicion for some time as possibly having killed Ronja. Etrianna however quickly quenched these fears to most locals pointing to the lonely and pitiful figure Ne had become; as could often be seen staring silently into the fire at the inn for entire days at a time trying to drink himself into a coma.

Eventually Ne's sorrow would also end after aiding in the rescue of the elven woman Lia from the drow. The two became quick friends and eventually she even agreed to be with Ne on his own terms and even began calling herself his mate. Eventually Ne fathered a daughter with Lia who they named Chi'hue and the three continue as a family to this day. Ne and Lia's Dwelling is known to be in the Humfoo region though its exact location is closely guarded and know only to a few close friends.

[LifeLikeSage]

Your ego blisteringly shines through