jordangreywolf (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jordangreywolf) wrote2023-08-03 08:38 pm
jordangreywolf) wrote2023-08-03 08:38 pm
[Art & Warcraft Stuff] November Doodles
Challenging the White Tiger
Where did we leave off? Well, the Vigilants continued their pilgrimage across Pandaria, with a visit to the temple of Xuen the White Tiger. Of course, there had to be a challenge to a fight. The PCs didn't win, but the tiger-god was a good sport about it, and it was only a sparring match after all.
(Chef's Kiss!)
A gnomish chef creates a culinary wonder. Mwa! C'est magnifique!
Gnome Chef, Revisited
I remade the chef's picture to show him on the streets of Stormwind, with a pie, so he could have something to use for his pie-selling booth. (Some players RP running booths at various markets, and put some work into decorating custom menus for their imaginary wares.)
"♫ When the moons hit your eye, ♪
♫ Like a big, peach-y pie, ♪
♫ That's a-gnom-é----- ♪"
"♫ And ov-en smells fine, ♪
♫ Set to three-forty-nine, ♪
♫ That's a-gnom-é----- ♪"
"♫ Bells will ring, ♪
♫ Ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling, ♪
♫ Take it out, it's done well-a! ♪"
"♫ Set the tray, ♪
♫ Tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy tay, ♪
♫ Oh that lovely fresh smell-a! ♪"
...
Counting Bird's Nests
An ancient Titansteel war golem with some eccentric interpretations of her "programming" goes on patrol around Stormwind City, counting bird's nests. Steve the Lizard stands by in case anything interesting falls out.
The Cathedral Square Gazebo
I worked on a few location scenes for filler pieces for the Stormwind Daily. One thing that struck me is that in-game everything is just one season, but IC-wise presumably there'd be changing seasons with autumn leaves, snowfall, etc. Otherwise, why bother celebrating seasons at all? So I tried making variants of the same location at different times of the year.
A.R.A.C.H.N.I.D. Trial Run
A.R.A.C.H.N.I.D. (Automatic Rapid-Application Combat Healing 'N' Injection Device), pictured on this gnome tinker's shoulder in the picture above, had a trial run with a gnoll "volunteer," though it ran into a bit of a snag when the gnoll panicked at the sight of the crawling robot with its syringe-tipped legs and injection mandibles and dashed into a nearby warehouse. After tripping over a box of rejected Bath Balms and knocking over a crate of bandage-gun ammo, the resultant explosion had the side benefit of: a) healing the gnoll from the immediate effects of the explosion; b) securing him so thoroughly with all the bandages that he couldn't keep running on into the Concentrated Explodium storage bay. Disaster averted! Somewhat.
Asked for a comment, the crazy gnoll only offered a muffled "Hee hee!"
Okay, so the gnome is supposed to be Pippy, but I had a lot of trouble doing the face this time around. Need more practice.
(Adjusts Glasses. GLEAM!)
It's a restaurant in a fantasy city, but sometimes rowdy sorts show up. This guy is supposed to help deal with that, but still look dignified while doing so. (Character portrait for someone from an RP group using a spot in Dalaran to proxy for a really fancy "café" in Stormwind City.)
Hands are hard to draw. So are necks, apparently. Still practicing.
Death Knight Giving a Speech ... at Night
A death knight giving a speech at the Stormwind Cathedral Gazebo. Whatever the topic is, I guess I'm going to listen, but at a nice, respectful DISTANCE away.
The Holiday Broker
One of the new NPC "races" introduced would be semi-ethereal beings known as "brokers" in the Shadowlands. They seem an awful lot like the Ethereals in some respects, just less mummy-like, and with a bit of a "we don't quite get this mortal stuff" silliness.
A Broker from the Great Beyond, dealing in Festive Ornamentation of Select Planetary-Rotation Instances of Special Symbolic Importance. Or, in other words, leftover holiday knickknacks.
Yak Attack!
A panicked yak blunders into the middle of a tournament match, and by Xuen the White Tiger's rules ... the yak is now a competitor! Much mayhem ensues.
The Drunken Tea Master
A hozen martial artist master squares off against several challengers at his mountaintop hideaway, even though they showed up right in the middle of tea time.
Stormwind Pumpkin Pie
Inspired by those "turkey crust" or "autumn leaf crust" finishes for pumpkin pies I see here and there online, it's a pumpkin pie. It's that time of year again, Pilgrim's Bounty, when it's easy as pie (and spice bread stuffing and cranberry chutney and roasted turkey...) to grind that Classic Cooking skill up from 1 to 295. (I read somewhere you can get it up to 300 with the Pilgrim's Bounty recipes, but at 295 everything seems to go "grey" for me. Still, that's a pretty good run.)
On the same day, there was a cooking quest to go gather Stormwind Pumpkins at the north side of the city. I'm sure they're much like Elwynn Pumpkins or Mogu Pumpkins or any other sort of pumpkin, but stick an Azerothian location name in front and now it's a Warcraft thing!
Draenei and Snow
Portrait of a Light-Forged Draenei character in a winter snowfall. (The character's player seemed to be having a rough time, so I did a quick little doodle in hopes of a slight cheer-up.)
Priestess of the Light
A priestess in the ruins of Uldaman, discussing her findings (with other adventure party members, off panel) of some ancient relics related to Keeper Tyr.
The Fallen Sentinel of Uldaman
Sentinel Talondras, alas, hasn't a chance against the onslaught of bored adventurers grinding their way through every tidbit of pre-release patch material. What a cool sethrak-like Titan-born! (Makes me wish sethrak were playable. And gnolls. And arakkoa. And ... okay, I could go on and on.)
Kul Tiran Coffee
It's like Irish coffee, only there's no Ireland in Azeroth, so ... Kul Tiran! And, no, despite the reputation that Kul Tiran cooking has, there's no fish oil in it. In the background is the interior of a tavern in Boralus. This was drawn for a weekly recipe article, usually food-focused, but sometimes it veers into cocktails and such.
no subject
Basically, while a lot of work was obviously put into gathering all the lore and filling in a few gaps and so forth, there was a lot of inconsistency about how they were treating the underlying base mechanics of d20 and classes and monsters, and such, and how much they were just "re-skinning" D&D basics, and how much they were trying to introduce Warcaft/WoW stylings.
A prime example would be the relationship between Hunters and Pets, and Druids and Animal Companions.
In the MMO, Hunters are the ones with Pets, whereas Druids do not.
In d20, Druids have Animal Companions, while Rangers (the nearest Hunter equivalent) have a watered-down version of them.
In WoW d20, Druids ALSO have Animal Companions ... and they can Wild Shape ... and they've got spells In WoW d20, Hunters will eventually gets pets ... at level 5. And they aren't as good as Animal Companions. Basically, Druids in WoW d20 were able to out-pet the Hunters!
Another problem was the matter of the cosmology. D&D has long had a big tie between Alignment and certain classes, such as Paladins. Paladins are kind of like Fighters/Warriors, but with these cool extra powers, but the downside is that they have to answer to a higher power, and so forth.
But in World of Warcraft, you have (just for starters) the Scarlet Crusade and evil paladins but they aren't anti-paladins or such. Their powers are indistinguishable from completely good-guy paladins. Same goes for their priests, who all invoke the powers of the Holy Light, and you can quite well have two opposing forces of paladins and priests, both sides invoking the power of the Holy Light against each other, without any higher power going, "Hey, waitaminute, my followers, I'm not going to grant power for you to obliterate each other!"
And then there's the world-setting: in World of Warcraft, you can pretty much expect that you'll be running into every sort of monster, or some flavor thereof, pretty much anywhere on the planet, and whether you're level 1 or level 70, you're going to be in for a fight. In d20 WoW, if there's a murloc, it's level X, and will only be a challenge for a certain narrow range of levels, and then if you have any more murlocs show up, you're either going to have to beef them up with character levels (an arduous, time-consuming process, NOT to be done on the fly), or else they're just a joke, easily taken out with a single spell or sweep attack.
While World of Warcraft owes a great deal to D&D for inspiration, trying to translate the setting back into any flavor of D&D I think requires a little more finesse to work properly. (Or at the very least ... I could have really used some *adventure modules*. There were plenty of sourcebooks, but I don't think I ever saw a single "dungeon" I could simply put the heroes through, without having to make stuff up from scratch.)
All that said, it *has* occurred to me that if I run a tabletop game again, one of the (many) possible settings could be Warcraft. I have plenty of minis that could work, and I could probably "reskin" a D&D dungeon with Warcrafty trappings and name-drops. It would mostly depend upon how many of my potential players are familiar with and/or like the setting.
no subject
I wouldn't necessary claim the Scarlet Crusade to be *evil* per se, they are good by their own light, it's just that they're so hardline about 'purifying' things that it comes across evil to others. Or do you mean WoW d20 specifically states Scarlet Crusade paladins are evil, so that players won't feel bad about mowing them down by the dozens?
Anyway, I could see turning Blackrock Depths into a D&D-style dungeon, patterned after the old-time Classic era version. ^.^
no subject
FWIW, the definition of the paladin in the core WoW book says that they are Good-aligned. No exception is given (or any mention made) of the Scarlet Crusade. Honestly, I can't even remember if the Scarlet Crusade were present in the game from the start, or if they were added as later material -- perhaps they didn't exist at this point, and therefore it was a non-issue. Or, it could be as you say, and they're just "misguided." I could definitely see that argument. One problem I suppose about the cosmology of the Warcraft universe is that you don't have a deity (generally speaking) to set you straight and go, "Oh, hey, waitaminute, if you're going to go murdering people, I'm not going to help you do it with MIRACLES, at the very least." Or, if you're playing an orcish druid and you decide to use Summon Nature's Ally to conjure a rhino in order to drop it on someone's head (or summon it atop a precipice and command it to jump onto someone's head, for the same effect), there's no deity to say, "Shame, shame, abusing that poor rhino! No more Summon Nature's Ally for YOU!"
One interesting detail about how d20 went about defining the classes that I forgot about, was that they "genericized" certain classes. For primary spellcasters, there were Healers, and there were Arcanists. If you were a Healer, you'd have a sub-type that was either Priest, Druid, or Shaman. There were some shared Healer spells (the basic healing spells, naturally), but each had its own sub-type-specific spells. Also, the mechanic of "turn undead" was turned into a shared mechanic of "turn/rebuke X," where "X" might vary depending upon your sub-type. For priests, it was still undead -- you TURN them if you're good, or REBUKE them (command them) if you're evil. For druids, however, replace undead with the ability to Rebuke Animals (i.e., command them) if good, or Turn/Destroy them if evil. Shamans replaced X with elementals.
It's just that they also slapped on various class features, such as what kind of armor you can wear and weapons you can use, shamans got totems, and druids still got the bog-standard D&D "druid animal companion" -- even though that had no basis in-game, and I think it was just a product of just cut-and-pasting most of the details from the druid class SRD, without giving much thought that it was intruding upon the domain of the Hunter. I think on a certain level they were thinking, "Oh, the Hunter is just this world's version of the Ranger, and we all know that Druids get the really good animal companion and rangers get the watered-down version." So whereas MMO players would recognize Hunters as the "I have a pet" class, in the d20 game you end up with Hunters getting saddled with the watered-down ranger pet version (you don't get it until level 5, you have to find it yourself, and there's no benefit for befriending a particularly POWERFUL or UNIQUE pet, because it's just going to fit the level-progression "ranger pet" profile from that point on) -- and, meanwhile, you can act surprised as the druid gets a BETTER PET than you will ever have (AND doesn't have to go on a special side-quest to find it).
Someone just wasn't thinking.
no subject
I seem to recall the WoW universe does have... the Light! (generically speaking) It's never been clear to me exactly how that works but given the Scarlet Crusade get along just fine with the Light, I kind of suspect it's based on the character's own morality: as long as the character is abiding by their interpretation of the Light, and that interpretation isn't too far off, the Light is happy to aid them.
So if you're a druid and you're abusing animals, I think it's well within GM-ish prerogatives to claim 'Your next summon seems slower to ansewr your call. Perhaps they're worried about what happened to that poor rhino.'
Anyway, I guess the animal companion stuff is just a sign the WoW RPG was just shoveling stuff into a box and ticking off a checklist of features!
no subject
Over time, however, the Light has become just another source of energy that just happens to be opposed to Shadow/Void. Sure, Light energy just HAPPENS to be well-suited to healing, but its use has little to nothing to do with the power of its wielder. Partly I think this is because in the demands of the MMO, "all things must be fought." If there is a cute new baby ducky introduced to the game, there will be a quest where you have to go kill cute baby duckies "to preserve the balance of nature." If there are paladins, shamans, mages, unicorns, wish-granting dragons, YOU NAME IT, at some point you will be given a quest to kill it. Are we going to finally introduce the Titans after all this time? Well, only if we have some convoluted reason why we have to FIGHT THEM, because this is a game about fighting things, so if you can't fight it, it has little reason to be in the game.
I exaggerate, but there seems to be a lot of creative pressure in that direction.
Whatever came first, it works its way into the lore. The different types of magical energy -- whether they come from nature, light, shadow/void, fel, arcane, etc. -- basically just devolve into different "flavors" or "colors" of energy, and maybe on occasion certain targets are more vulnerable to certain types of energy, but most of the time that can just be safely ignored as you button-mash every spell you've got as soon as the cooldown hits in order to maximize your DPS to take down that boss.
Want to power a big stompy robot with magitech? Well, choose what color you'd like the glowy bits to be, and we've got an energy for you. Neon green? Fel. Light blue? Arcane. Purple? Shadow/void. Golden? Light. I mean, seriously, a Warforged Frame powered by "the light." Show up to Brewfest, and every few seconds someone will be commenting about "Voidwine is my favorite drink ever!" I'm pretty sure there's somewhere you can get felburgers, with absolutely no dire consequences whatsoever for consuming them. Once upon a time, there were big plot points about how the high elves suffered from magic-addiction due to dabbling so long in the arcane, yet no longer having access to the Well of Eternity, and this led to all kinds of shenanigans with Blood Elves, Void Elves, etc., but ... eh, they just found different energy sources. And while a standard D&D trope is that healing is a bad thing for the undead (I don't know if that was a thing in the RTS games), I guess they couldn't abide by that for long if they were going to make the Forsaken be playable characters. Never mind if your Forsaken guy is missing a jaw, or if we can see your ribs sticking out -- you'll still get drunk and heal from food and spells and potions the exact same as everyone else, because any other mechanic would be a pain to implement.
Once upon a time, back in "vanilla," if you were playing a warlock, there was at least some slight pretense that you were being secretive about it, but they never bothered to have you "hide" your prancing imps or strutting succubi when you walked through Stormwind, and I guess at some point programmers thought it would be cute to have NPCs refer to you by your class ("Good job, Warlock!") so I guess it's canon that it's brazenly obvious at a glance what powers you dabble with and it's no big deal anywhere.
I get why things would drift this way -- this franchise has been around a LONG time, the original creators are gone, and there's inevitably going to be some "adaptation entropy." The problems arise, I think, when I run into things that reference those lingering bits of lore that hint that maybe it DID matter what sort of magic you were dabbling with, and it mashes horribly with the current state of, "Oh, demons, demon-hunters, paladins, void monsters, mages, druids, we all just get along swimmingly -- tra la laaaaa!" XD
no subject
But, I figure it's a function of time, and as you play through the earlier game and progress to the later, you're also seeing time pass in the game. It may be surprisingly quick for the public to accept warlocks etc. but you could view it as them recognizing your warlock from the stories about your past exploits, and realizing you're not there to sacrifice their children and pets.
I did enjoy the comparison of various types of energies to 'color glows'. ^.^