[Art] April Foolishness

[jordangreywolf]

Consulting the Ancestor Spirits
In March, a multi-server RP event was held in Mar'at, Uldum on the Moon Guard server (with "anchors" volunteering to help players from other servers temporarily join in, and coordination via a Discord server) called the "World's Faire Carnival." I think "faire" and "carnival" seem a bit redundant, but, eh, who cares? This included such things as the cooking competition I drew some doodles of in my previous entry, but also various merchants, games, and so forth. One booth featured a Tauren shaman "consulting the ancestor spirits" to tell fortunes. (And by "fortune," it was more like, "generalized advice." But, hey, it was the sort of thing a "faire" or carnival should have, right?)



Exploring Titan Ruins
Even with the Faire going on every single day for a week, we still had our regular RP night on Tuesdays. In this session, the adventurers explored a Titan ruin. (That's a really big FOOT in the background.)



Kaftar Snickersnack, Gnoll "Chef"
I originally scribbled this guy as a character concept for a Warcraft RPG tabletop campaign about ... whoa ... almost 20 years ago? Anyway, at the time Gwendel rejected the concept as too silly. I revived him for some silliness on WoW, by basically playing a Worgen with as gnoll-like colors for the fur as I could get, and then describing him as a gnoll in his TRP profile, getting an apron and chef's hat and the cook pot, and making a menu for him. He gleefully serves some pretty awful stuff, with TRP items to represent them (you get delayed-reaction messages from some of the more awful stuff like, "Ugh ... your tummy doesn't feel so good," with some tummy-rumbling sound effects, if you eat the last instance of the food item from your inventory). He pretty much hangs around, does a patently awful job at passing himself off as a "lee-jit-a-mutt" vendor, and eventually gets chased off by a guard or adventurer ("Nyee hee hee heeeeeee!" -- *run away!*).

Oh, sure, it SMELLS pretty good, but who knows what's in that mystery meat? Of course, I do have to consider that this is Warcraft we're talking about, where adventurers have been eating gooey spider legs, murloc eyes, and buzzard meat, and just about anything EXCEPT for chickens or cows or sheep or pigs since day one. It's just that hardly anybody roleplays that way at the markets.



Da Still-Kickin' Kitchen
"It'sll make yur tummy feels funny!" How's that for a tagline? First, there's Rat-a-Touille with extra-juicy rats. "Choklit Rats" -- like chocolate rabbits, but with rats! Oh, and not hollow. Roasted Squash -- it's freshly stomped! Chikin Noodel Soop -- tastes like chikin! Includes a real "chikin noodel" and a couple of claws as garnishes. the Squirmyburger Platter has extra-crispy FLINCH FLIES. And finally, to drink, there's Giggle Joos: basically, he does just like that old Dalaran "quest" and goes around finding half-filled drinks, and the little bit of booze at the bottom of discarded bottles outside the "fanciest" bars and hotels, and collects it all into a greasy-looking bottle, pours into a discarded, possibly leaky mug, then garnishes it with a scavenged paper umbrella to make it "fancy." The slice of lime is probably the freshest thing he has to offer (well, unless you count a very-recently-live rat as "fresh").



Pizza Rat!
Speaking of rats, a Vulpera vendor ran a booth called "Pizza Rat." The story was that this little rat was trapped in a storage room with a supply of kaja'mite (the phlebetonium that supposedly grants certain goblins their extremely unstable intelligence) and now he's smart enough to prep ingredients for pizza. Of course, that means you've got a rat crawling all over your pizza as it's being made, but, hey, it takes all kinds, right?



Hawking Wares for the Imperi-Yum
There's this RP group that has made up the island nation of "Rizgard," and its "empire," drawing lots of design cues from ancient Rome, but with goofy details such as Tilly Tonka's Chocolate Factory for its exports. The "emperor" himself (AKA their guild leader) often shows up at their booth at the Stormwind Market. They seem so friendly, and yet any RP sessions that involve visiting Rizgard usually involve some sort of Roman-era barbarity (is that a misuse of the term?) popping up.



Recruiting for the Ebon Cloak Collective
Just another day at the Job Fair -- groups vying to convince adventurers to sign up for their particular gangs to go on adventures or goof off or whatever it is they do. This picture is really nothing more than another "here is this character, standing here, gesturing" doodle, but I suppose that's one of the pitfalls of trying to churn these things out in timely fashion.



Nerubian Lich
Illustration of a creepy "Nerubian Lich," from an RP session. Nerubians are normally "spider-taur" types, but I guess there's a lot of physical variability when it comes to the insectoid-ish races in Warcraft (especially being that despite their spider-like features, Nerubians apparently actually have skeletons rather than exoskeletons, or perhaps it's some sort of strange hybrid).



Ring Out Your Undead
A paladin using the "Dead Ringer" bell to drive off a horde of ghouls.



The Deathspeaker
A "Deathspeaker" Draenei (Death Knight class, but played as a "good-guy necromancer") helping the souls of the vanquished undead off to their eternal rest. (In theory, anyway: canonically, thanks to the Shadowlands expansion, they're pretty much doomed to get stuck in the Maw until someone rescues them, but ... details, details!)



Happy Vaffeldragon!
Okay, so one thing that made me sad was that Pie Day happened during the World's Faire week, so the Stormwind Market was cancelled, and I had a menu all ready to go for Pie Day (with new pie illustrations). Well, the next Ironforge Market came up, so what could we possibly celebrate instead? Well, I looked up in Google to see if there were any oddball holidays and ... "Vaffeldagen." Waffle day! Except "dagen" looked a lot like dragon, so, how could I Warcraft-ize it? VAFFELDRAGON! It's a day for making waffles ... that are shaped like dragons. Totally silly, but I ran with it. Also, I drew this in like 12 minutes or so.



Patrolling the Ironforge Market
An Ironforge guard patrolling the Commons outside the bank, accompanied by Blinky the Alarm-o-Bot.



Onyx Panther
The player of the leader of the Ironforge Market had to deal with a sick kid (who had to go to the emergency room), and I drew this doodle for a sort of digital "get-well card" substitute.



Shielding the Faithful
Quickie doodle of a priestess putting up a protective shield during an RP session when the adventurers went up against those liches again.



The Blue Barrister
This isn't really from Warcraft RP at all, but rather it's a doodle of Koogrr's blue jay "lawyer" character (well, actually a Kurasu Tengu who just happens to have blue-jay-like markings) from a Pathfinder MUCK. Or maybe it's an Arrakoa with blue jay markings. If I can find an excuse to work a blue-jay-colored Arrakoa in as an NPC for a Warcraft RP session, I'll certainly do so.




Kicking Deathwing in the Shin
For the April 1st issue of the Stormwind Daily, there was first released a faux issue called the "Orgrimmar Infrequent." This was news to me, and I was asked to come up with some joke material ... and fast. Well, I got the crazy idea that Kaftar the "stoopid gnoll" could act as a stand-in "reporter" for some goings-on at the Tyr's Fall base of the Vigilants of Tyr. I'd write the article from his point of view. One alleged event was that Deathwing showed up and Glauric "The Awesomest" Goldwrought personally kicked him in the shin and made him cry. (Kaftar also dutifully reported that Glauric paid him some gold to report that this true thing, which actually happened, actually happened. Totes legit!) One nice perk about Kaftardoodles is that I can do them VERY QUICKLY.



Kaftar's Kitchin Kookin Katastrofee (KABOOM!)
"I tried to cook some dinner but it’s hard to go hunting around here, so I set a trap and caught a rabbit that was kind of heavy for a rabbit and made clickety-clack noises, but I tossed it in the stew anyway. Ms. Pippy Thundercog came by asking if I had seen her Robotic Animal Biomorphic Binary Information Tracker, but I said no, and even had her help me spell that out for my news article because she uses lots of really techie words. Then the stew pot exploded. I think I put in too much pepper."