[Art & Warcraft Stuff] November Doodles

[jordangreywolf]

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.

Comments

[tuftears]

Good grief, $252 for a gaming book does seem overpriced. o.o

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!

[jordangreywolf]

I think the problem is that there's been a bit of a mythos-creep in the Warcraft universe, due to pressure set by the tropes of the MMO. In the original RTS, the Alliance had paladins basically following a "generic God" type deity -- even to the point that there were references to "God" in conjunction with the priests and paladins of Northshire. That was eventually replaced with more-generic references to the "Light," but even then it seemed to be a deity-like entity tending toward goodness, healing, etc.

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

[tuftears]

Yeah, you raise some good points about successive handwaving leading to a watering down of the original antipathies in WoW. Horde vs Alliance was a selling point back when but grows ever sillier as the threats become cosmic and both sides are forced to unite against Azeroth-threatening calamities, too, to the point that we can now have cross-faction guilds and dungeons/raids.

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'. ^.^