Doodley Boodley Doo!

[Wids]

So after Chilango complimented me on those Pony doodles, and I so humbly replied that those were just me goofing around, and that that eight-year-old doodle of Bai Shan and her clock was more like what I do when I'm in Serious Doodling Mode, I got to thinking about the various other drawings that I've done, while at the same time wondering what kinds of artsy pics some of all y'all may have done.  And so, following the useful approach of "I'll show you mine, now you show me yours....":    

Various doodles of Serrica Thallys, my Cleric of Umberlee from the bygone Pirate Isles server.  She made it to Level 17 on a server where if you actually made it to Level 12, you were doing very well indeed.  She was great.  Too bad the new DM over that server basically peed all over my plans for Serrica to build and establish a new temple to Umberlee on Palaggar.  And after I'd worked with two other DMs, scrounged up oodles of building materials, liberated a defiled Umberlant shrine after beating back waves upon waves of harpies sworn to Ardat the Unavowed, then conducted a grand ritual to cleanse and reconsecrate the shrine, to which Umberlee unleashed an awesome hurricane and scoured the surviving harpies...suffice it to say that the new DM scuttled a lot of effort and planning over her mere laziness.  Bah.    

Serrica slaying Podarge, the queen of Prespur's covey of harpies and high priestess of Ardat the Unavowed.  Soonafter, with Podarge's death leaving the harpies in disarray, Serrica was reanimating some of the slain harpies in her wake (with DM Scurvy's help) and using the harpy zombies to lift the Shrine to Umberlee and move it out of the tribe's territory, then to an uncharted bay which Serrica had discovered and named Umberlee's Shoal.  The Church of Umberlee later promoted her to the rank of Puissant Undertow for succeeding in this quest (though given how anarchic the Church of Umberlee tends to be, the promotion didn't really earn her all that much.  At least the title was cool for Serrica to throw around in conversation, though.  C'est la guerre.).


Podarge had some pretty good defenses, so it was a bit strange that the death blow came as one of Serrica's humble 1st Level Negative Energy Rays, courtesy of the Evil Domain.  Sometimes, evil is not vanquished by good; sometimes, evil is vanquished by a different kind of evil.

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I could have just sent the DMs a simple text of a PM detailing Serrica's plans for establishing a new Temple of Umberlee, but no.  I had to send this bunch of doodleys.

I'm excessive like that.  

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...yeah, just a little excessive.

Too bad the idea of turning the upended stern of a sunken ship into a Temple of Umberlee wouldn't have worked out, given the Toolset's limitations.  But I thought it was a pretty cool idea.

Plodding wearily out of a watery sinkhole, Serrica emerges victorious from the underwater lair of Malfalaga the Hag Queen.  I'm still not quite satisfied with my efforts to make Serrica look sotting wet, weary, ragged, exhausted and badly injured, seeing as Malfalaga got Serrica down to Badly Wounded or Near Death before Serrica finally dealt the deciding blow.  But killing the Hag Queen was an essential part of Serrica's plan to win the hearts of the people of Uarhold and thereafter drive out what little of the Church of Valkur inhabited that port town, so that the Church of Umberlee could take their place as the people's "protectors".  The Church of Ilmater, with their crucial role in Uarhold's merrow-ravaged population, would not be nearly so easy for Serrica to depose (and truth be told, she never did succeed at driving the Ilmateri out of Uarhold as she had done with the Valkurites; sometimes, the good guys do win).

Serrica's quest to seduce Uarhold over to the Dark Side by becoming their "holy champion" continued onward.

This was my tally sheet which I kept next to my keyboard for several months, marking how many merrow (the ogre kind, not the merfolk kind) and sea hags Serrica had killed and beheaded, then marking how many times a DM was on to possess the Mayor of Uarhold and accept the severed proof of Serrica's deeds.  Eventually the mayor just threw up his hands and said, "Okay, okay!  We get it!  You're our savior and our defender against the merrow, and Uarhold recognizes you as such!  Now would you please get all these festering merrow heads out of my office?"  So Serrica said something like, "By the way, I'm not a priestess of Istishia.  I'm a priestess of Umberlee.  She's your benefactor, not Istishia."  "Fine, okay, whatever.  Hail Umberlee, praise Umberlee, get this mountain of merrow heads out of my office now, Umberlee!"  Something like that.  

Okay, this was me in Not-Remotely-Serious Mode again.  During one of his DM events, DM Scurvy offhandedly said that Serrica was the only character on the server who would be insane enough to try surfing a tsunami.  And that was that.  

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...okay, this was crap.  But seriously, there was one merchant at Umberlee's Shoal, a smuggler named Galleon Reyer.  He got attacked by wandering harpies a lot.  Sometimes the harpies would charm him and he would attack Serrica, which really ticked me off.  So why not get a boatload of construction stuff, build Deepwater Harbor in an adjoining area to the South (which would be directly over one of the server's underwater areas, a shark-infested area aptly named the Feeding Grounds), put Umberlee's shrine (and eventual temple) further out to sea and let Galleon moor his little coastal boat there, where the harpies were far less likely to get to him?

Alas, this plan never came to fruition.  So Galleon kept getting jumped by harpies until the day the server died.  Pity.

(And by Blue Dragons, Serrica meant Cormyr's Navy, not actual blue dragons.  There weren't any blue dragons on Prespur.  There was a monstrous tyrannosaurus rex whom the local lizardfolk worshipped as a god, but Serrica obliterated it with three Destruction spells.  Take that, you scurvy lizardfolk and your stupid, backwards religion!    )

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This is definitely crap.  Grade-D, Paint-Shop-Pro-vomited stick figure crap.  But at least it's fun stick figure crap.  




Incidentally, Marion Sails was the NPC priestess of Valkur and keeper of Valkur's shrine in Palaggar, and the leading reason why Palaggar never turned against Valkur and embraced Umberlee in his stead, despite Serrica's long political campaign to accomplish just that.  Even before Serrica threw off the masquerade and revealed her grand deception, Marion suspected that Serrica was not a Cleric of Istishia, but was rather some manner of enemy.  So every conversation between Serrica and a DM-possessed Marion was always catty, snide, insulting and perhaps even threatening.  Serrica never did get around to sacrificing Marion to Umberlee, but oh, how she fantasized about it!





Another unfinished (or at least unshaded) doodle, one of Serrica dueling one of those pirate captains in some pirate cove along Prespur's western coasts.  I think I drew these doodles because I couldn't decide which to make her primary weapon: Her Rapier of the High Road (which she bought from a reclusive xvart merchant after destroying his huge dragon statue with an Ice Storm spell; thanks, Water Domain!) or her Sssrexiss Dagger (Sssrexiss being the name of that tyrannosaur-god that she killed; she took one of Sssrexiss' teeth to a crafting station and turned it into this dagger).  She ended up choosing the rapier, though she did hang onto the dagger as a memento.

Breaking things off here, because this post is big enough as it is. 

[Wids]

So after Prisoners of the Mist and Bai Shan Jingshen came Pirate Isles of the Forgotten Realms and Serrica Thallys.  After that (or perhaps somewhere around that time) came the first incarnation of the Thay server and Tristella d'Flagellad, Fighter/Blackguard of Loviatar.

The doodley prefacing Tristella's biography in the Thay forums.  In brief, Tristella was born and reared in Damara, where the Church of Ilmater holds sway and where their enemies — the Church of Loviatar — must worship and operate in hiding.  One Damaran family which had served Loviatar for generations was the d'Flagellad family, who had served the Dukes of Damara — as well as the Goddess of Cruelty and Suffering — as skilled torturers and interrogators.  The d'Flagellads' closeness to Damara's nobility is largely what spared them from the Church of Ilmater's persecution for well over a century, but not even dukes and barons could protect them from Zhengyi the Witch-King's bloody conquest over Damara.  When that time came, the d'Flagellads chose to stand and fight the undead hordes alongside their noble lords.  But the Witch-King's victory seemed very likely, so Tristella was one of the few d'Flagellads sent out of Damara in the face of the conquest, so that some of them would survive to uphold the d'Flagellad legacy and, perhaps, to return one day and avenge their fallen house against the Witch-King when the hour was right.

Tristella's destination was the wicked, magocratic dystopia of Thay, where so many wayfarers come to suffer and perish.  But conversely, Tristella thrived and took to Thay's climate very well indeed.  For the first time in her life, the tables turned between her matron goddess and her enemy god; here, it was Loviatar who dominated the Thayan people alongside her consort Bane, and it was Ilmater who was scorned, persecuted and forced to work clandestinely.  So Tristella threw herself into her work and her worship with a vengeance, becoming a favored torturer and interrogator among several of the reigning Red Wizards of Thay while saving the worst of her tortures for what few Ilmateri dared to cross her path.

And then, passing an interview with one of Loviatar's erinyes — who took Tristella's unholy vows to the Maiden of Pain and savagely flogged Tristella's naked back and shoulders with a devil whip to forever grace her skin with Loviatar's mark — she ascended into the ranks of Loviatar's blackguards...an unusual kind of blackguard, at that.  Most blackguards limit their threats to bloodshed and murder, but Tristella was not so gentle.  She was the rare sort of blackguard who killed people if she was feeling merciful.  Instead, she typically inspired people to throw themselves on their swords because the last thing that they wanted was for Tristella to take them alive.  And Thay's capture-and-slavery scripts helped her very well in that regard; there were several times when I'd be roleplaying by myself by taking a captured brigand or monster into the altar room of Loviatar's Manor in Bezantur, alternately flogging the helpless captive with the most ordinary of Tristella's whips, then healing them when they were Near Death so that she could slowly lash them to within an inch of death again, and DM Thayan or another DM who happened to be peeking in without my knowledge would give Tristella a chunk of Roleplay XP for being a typically horrible and vicious Loviatan.  Tristella did that with roughly every tenth captive that she brought into Bezantur in chains, believing that to be Loviatar's due; the rest of the captives got sold to the slave pits for a tidy sum of Gold, Experience and Evil points.

Seeing that "Dominator" title pop up when you've made it to a perfect Alignment score of Lawful (100) Evil (0) is always rewarding in itself.  

The bad news is that the whip is a terribly impractical weapon in NWN (and perhaps in D&D as a whole); its damage is laughably weak, and its free Disarm ability may as well be called the "Give Your Enemy a Free Attack" ability for as often as it fails.  (Yes, the Thay server had disarming enabled among most of its monsters and NPCs, and all of its PCs.)  Tristella had a 17 Strength, Weapon Focus: Whip, Weapon Specialization: Whip and Improved Critical: Whip, but it all only made Tristella's whips marginally less lousy.  Combine all this focus on the wretchedly inadequate whip with an underwhelming Prestige Class like Blackguard, and you have a recipe for suckiness.  As a result, Tristella got her butt kicked a lot.  And she died a lot too.  Sure, the whip was perfect for Tristella's "Why kill them quickly when you can slowly and brutally tear strips of skin off their bodies and flog them to death, and thus prolong their suffering?" gimmick, but it wasn't very practical when it came to killing a rampaging owlbear before it ate her alive.  She eventually ended up getting a bastard sword for when she needed to kill things quickly, reasoning, "Well, swift executions are disappointments for me, and disappointment is pain, and Loviatar revels in my pain, so why not?".

(Her other favorite tidbits of Loviatan wisdom — which she sometimes shared with other player-characters — included the anachronistically Nietzschean "That which fails to kill me makes me stronger," the not-so-Nietzschean "That which fails to kill me will desperately wish that it had," and the simply nasty "Every one of us is born into the world naked, screaming and drenched with blood.  Why should we stop there?".  I conscientiously avoided "Pain is weakness leaving the body" because that phrase has become so trite with every stupid jock in the world chanting it and I'm sick to my guts of hearing it, let alone reciting it.    )

So one day, Red Wizard Ihsahn — another PC of higher Level and prestige in Thayan society, as well as one of Tristella's benefactors — produced a Tarot deck and decided to read Tristella's fortune.  So Ihsahn drew the card which would represent Tristella and all that she was, and the card so happened to be the Hanged Man, representing (among other things) someone who feels calm or content despite the great adversity around them, or one who conquers the adversity by surrendering to it.  I thought that the Hanged Man card fit Tristella quite well — given the unsettling calm and pure work ethic with which Tristella could inflict suffering on others and/or endure it herself — so as this happened later in Tristella's biography, I saw fit to merge Tristella and the Hanged Man card into one, hanging by one leg (with the other leg free) while she remains calm, thoughtful and pensive despite being subjected to an inverted crucifixion, which is one of the most drawn-out and insufferable ways to execute someone.  Appropriate, right?

Eventually, the first incarnation of the Thay server eventually ended with an end-of-the-world event, in which Mari Agneh's undead hordes overran Bezantur and Tristella valiantly died in battle while trying to defend Loviatar's Manor from overwhelming numbers of the vengeful dead, as did the rest of Loviatar's clergy.  Then Tristella herself came back as an undead revenant to harry the PCs who had survived Agneh's crucible, and the other PCs perma-killed her in the ensuing battle.  Alas.

I kind of wish that I had doodled more Tristella doodleys while she was around, but this is it.  

[Wids]

And then, after the first incarnation of Thay came and went, along came the second incarnation of Thay.  While several of the players there simply remade their characters from the first incarnation, considering that the first incarnation basically ended with things going so apocalyptically belly-up that Ao the Overgod himself had to reverse time and rebuild the world, I decided that it would be most appropriate to let Tristella d'Flagellad stay dead.  Enter, Corella d'Margo, Cleric of Leira, mysterious and perpetually deceitful.

For whatever reason, Leira isn't a very popular goddess, even in settings which take place before Troy Denning's friggin' Mary Sue villain Cyric (supposedly) killed her.  So I got to bask in the uniqueness of playing a Cleric whose every word must incorporate some sort of lie or deception.  Leirans are fun!  Leirans are a blast!  They're kind of like the Pooka from Changeling: The Dreaming in that they provoke you to really think about the concepts of deception and falsehood, as well as their many degrees.  It's not just as simple as playing "Say the opposite of what you mean" all the time; When you're obliged to lie but simply must tell someone what they need to know, you frame, preface or append the truth with a lie so outrageous that no one in their right mind would believe it, a la "I killed a hundred dragons to tell you that King Harold demands your presence in his court at once."  If it's someone you want to deceive or beguile into a trap, Suspiciously Specific Details and red herrings are your friend.  "No, I certainly don't know where your abridged copy of the Cyrinishad is, and it most certainly isn't inside that closet over there!"  (You know where the book is, and the book's not inside that closet...but a rabid owlbear is!  Watch them take the bait and catch an owlbear in the face.)  And sometimes you do have to tell the truth, because when your enemy expects every word out of your mouth to be a lie, then the truth itself perversely becomes an instrument of deceit.  "High Priest Warlins was not the one who murdered your wife."  (Then stand back and watch as you successfully deceive the angry knight into believing that the high priest was the one who murdered his wife — when in truth the high priest did no such thing — and with any luck, both the knight and the high priest will kill each other, thus removing two obstacles in the Leiran's path for the price of one.)

Truth can be a dangerous thing.  So can falsehood.

So of course, I had to tell Corella's biography through a series of messages (written on the forums through a series of posts, with varying colors and styles of text to represent different characters).  There were doodles to move the tale along, of course.

So of however many players and DMs bothered to read Corella's bio, only one of them guessed the outcome about halfway through the story: That the real Corella d'Margo was long dead, and that my character was actually an impostor named Annaletta Sardant, who as a little girl had been abducted by one Dame Corella d'Margo of Damara's Duchy of Carmathan and essentially impressed or enslaved to work for the lady as a servant girl.  Dame d'Margo had done her best to drive the Church of Leira out of her dominion, believing them to be no better than common scoundrels, even going so far as to capture a Leiran cleric who wished to confer and negotiate peace with her and torture him daily amid an interminable stay in her dungeon.  So then Annaletta's family followed the trail with the aid of the lady's preferred vintner, threatening to expose her for the kidnapper that she was unless their daughter was returned.  So then Dame d'Margo contracted a temple of Cyric to have the lot of them put to death, covering the murders up by attributing them to highwaymen and posting Wanted notices for a band of murderous criminals who in truth had never existed.  Meanwhile, Annaletta was clandestinely conspiring with the captured Leiran and his fellows in order to secure Annaletta's escape, but when Annaletta found the evidence that — despite the lady's efforts at a cover-up — Dame d'Margo had hired Cyricist assassins to do away with her family, mere escape was no longer good enough; vengeance would have its day.  So with the Leirans' help, Annaletta deceived the lady's personal guard and lured them elsewhere to confront disgruntled Cyricists who never existed, then set the manor ablaze, cornered Dame d'Margo in her cherished wine cellar and executed her with a crossbow.  And then Annaletta, having had years of captivity to observe Dame d'Margo's habits, mannerisms and ways of speech, assumed her identity and took her place, wearing a veil to mask her face (which was supposedly burned and scarred during the house fire).  During that time, Annaletta — masquerading as the lady — claimed that the Church of Leira had been the ones who healed her and saved her life after Cyric's assassins had set her manor ablaze and tried to assassinate her, and the humble Leiran shrine down the road went from being persecuted to being praised and supported overnight.  And all during her masquerade, Annaletta exacted her revenge against every person in Dame d'Margo's court who had aided the lady in tormenting her, ending when she shared a cask of wine with Lady d'Margo's cousins, her lover and every one of her attendants.  The wine had a very odd taste to it, and when the cask was drained empty yet still had an unexpected weight and mass tumbling inside, the cask was broken open and the source of the wine's odd taste was discovered: Lady d'Margo's wine-pickled corpse, still riddled with crossbow bolts.  Horrified, disgusted and perhaps ashamed at having been deceived by the impostor for so long, the people of Dame d'Margo's court opted to never allow the deception to be made common knowledge; none of them ever again spoke of the incident, and Dame d'Margo was secretly buried during the long hours of the night in an unmarked grave on the estate.

Corella d'Margo was dead.  Long live Corella d'Margo!

Around that time, Annaletta Sardant was graduating from her stay as an acolyte of the Church of Leira in Impiltur.  The Unmasking is a rite through which a Leiran ascends to the priesthood, and a new identity through which the Cleric will forever after be known — to other Leirans, if no one else — must be chosen, and the supplicant's original identity must be cast aside as a lie which Leira has torn away.  For her new name, Annaletta Sardant chose the name of the one who, through a series of her own deceptions, had taken her against her will, used her, broken her, robbed her of everything she had loved and set her on the road to becoming a servant of the Goddess of Lies.  Months later, a new Corella d'Margo would appear in Thay, on a mission to aid, support and protect the floundering Church of Leira in Bezantur while remaining vigilant against an unspeakably horrific yet unknown calamity to come from the direction of the usurper god Cyric and his own church.  And countless lies, disguises, masquerades and other feats of deception would follow with her.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we conspire to deceive, eh?

[Wids]

  

Eh, just scrounged up a few more doodles on all three of my old PotM characters: Viorica Biserica (werebeast-hunting Human Ranger), Bai Shan Jingshen (mountain-dwelling Banshee Caliban Monk) again, and Braknak Shoegrabber (sewer-dwelling Brute Caliban Barbarian).  They were fun while they lasted, but did my old scanner suck at picking up fine details or what?  

And nowadays, it's a pretty rare server where I limit myself to three characters or fewer!  Thay has a hard limit of three characters, so Thay doesn't count; you couldn't create more than three characters if you wanted to (and believe me, I did).  Altitis has truly taken hold on me.

[Wids]

For a while I was an off-and-on player on the bygone Star Wars: Rise of the Rebellion server; I had some characters come and go, but the one I stuck with all along was Zaniya Lir'oolsi, Twi'lek Soldier/Bounty Hunter (which in vanilla NWN would be more like a Fighter/Arcane Archer).

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The Commerce Guild was one of the few neutral factions in a persistent world which was dominated by both the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance, and Zaniya was one of the Commerce Guild's starfaring traders and occasional Collections agent.  Unlike most Twi'lek women, Zaniya wasn't very keen on seduction and half-naked dancing; she was a proud corporate professional and enforcer, greed was her driving vice and her motivation, and she gladly put her Appraise and Persuade skills to work in either role of her job.  No one welched on the Commerce Build and got away with it, not if Zaniya was on the clock!

Unfortunately, most of the SW:RotR DMs were in absentia, and what few DMs were left focused all of their energy on running events for the Imperial PCs or the Rebel PCs.  Zaniya joined in where she could (and whenever someone from those factions would deign to bargain with the Commerce Guild), but she mostly got ignored by DMs and players alike.  Such a pity; being the Lawful Neutral sort with no allegiance to either faction, she was very much interested in bargaining with both sides in hopes of perpetuating the war and lining her own pockets with Empire Credits and Alliance Credits alike.  She would have made a remarkable war profiteer.

[Wids]

...and to break off from NWN and the glories of past and present persistent worlds, some doodleys from my online D&D 3rd Edition campaign, which was formerly hosted by the City of Heroes Guru forums (which no longer exist) and is presently hosted by the storytelling website co-admined by one of my old friends from my Air Force years.  The campaign is typically played through series of forum posts, though at seldom times — when the stars are right — real-time gameplay through the Gametable client has taken place.

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A terribly unfinished doodle of Antinidia Zaumtor — Drow Elf Necromancer and player-character with a distinguishing case of necrophilia — aside Bitarosiel, an erinyes slated to serve as Antinidia's foil and nemesis throughout the campaign.  While Antinidia was very active back on the CoHG forums, his player failed to make the jump from the old site to the new site when CoHG started going under due to waning popularity, and so sadly, Antinidia simply faded out of the campaign.

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An even more unfinished doodle of Grim-by-Bones, a dread treant slated to serve as a nemesis to Yavana Ainsley, player character and Human Ranger (possibly to eventually die along with the rest of her noble House and return as a Vampire Ranger, depending on her player's actions during the prologue).  When a treant is put into a prologued slumber by poisoned earth and is used as both a black knight's trophy mount and a hangman's tree by unwitting townsfolk for well over a century, the treant is bound to be in a bit of a nasty mood when it eventually wakes up and pulls its roots out of the blood-soaked soil in a fit of primal rage.

Players joining the campaign must choose whether to make their characters descendants of the House of Ainsley — the cursed bloodline on which the entire campaign pivots — or outsiders who get drawn into House Ainsley's web of machinations through ill fortune, unwise ambition, outstanding debts, old alliances or blind happenstance.  Yavana represented the former, Antinidia represented the latter.  Unfortunately, Yavana suffered the same fate that Antinidia did; her player didn't make the migration from the old forums to the new, and Yavana Ainsley simply ceased to be.

Two doodles with the more noteworthy antagonists encountered — or to be encountered — by the player characters earlier on during their prologue chapters: "Lorea"/Lorelissai (illusory "beautiful maiden" disguise and true black annis form; slain by Antinidia Zaumtor after Lorelissai's illusions had lured Antinidia and his Vesperanti aides into her trap), Darrell the Dashing (highwayman leader, pixie-led away from his band where Yavana Ainsley could humble him in battle without alerting his lackeys), Weerbull Thistlenipp (gnomish vampire spawn; Yavana Ainsley and her player dropped out of the campaign during the forum migration, before Yavana could find Weerbull and put him back in his grave), Captain Hethakan Sharper (pirate captain; Corwin Ainsley and the rest of the Saint Alarice's privateers slew Sharper and his pirate crew aboard the Devil's Hangman during a pitched naval battle.  Yes, his right leg was a few inches shorter than his left and he had a scimitar blade where his left hand used to be), Lieutenant Ilisa Sturmkovich (Karkovan war leader, slain by Sir Ashton Ainsley during the Battle of Grishenko Pass, contributing to Bardosylvania and Konegheim's victory over Karkova), Sir Rushtan Karsak (Karkovan knight, also slain by Sir Ashton Ainsley in a fatal joust during the Battle of Grishenko Pass), Tiplit the Imp (little devil out to foil Vallin Stern's attempts to carry a message through the town of Dark Grove Hollow; Vallin and his player vanished before Vallin could ever set foot in Dark Grove Hollow and encounter the bothersome imp), Danika Grimm (vampire spawn mistakenly invited into her still-living sister's home; Sir Ashton Ainsley and his player left the campaign during the forum migration, so Danika Grimm remains forever unbanished), Brother Ravnik (Ghoul Cleric of Doresain), Deacon Praetus (Human Cleric of Doresain) and Sister Morvinia (Human Cleric of Doresain; Ravnik, Praetus and Morvinia were with the Cult of Doresain, working to undermine the Church of Wee Jas and destroy their local temple from within; sadly, Thornton Ainsley and his player vanished during the forum migration, so Thornton was no longer there to stop the Doresainar and their ambition).

SPOILER: Click to show

In the course of his play-through prologue, Corwin Ainsley (player character, Human Fighter/Cleric of the Devourer) threw off the shackles of his abusive and domineering mother by striking her down and locking her away in their cottage's cellar, to keep her as his pet for the rest of her days.  Pillaging the cottage for everything his mother owned, Corwin discovered this family portrait, which revealed that his mother was Gwenlyn Ainsley, descendant of the ruling family of bleak Bardosylvania.  Though he was born a bastard — and the product of incest between his mother and her bloodthirsty brother, then-Lord Borogon Ainsley, at that — Corwin began to entertain thoughts of claiming a place of power and heritage among the House of Ainsley.  However, his prologue took place a good 59 years before the campaign's present time, so Corwin was destined to be dead — and then undead, reborn as a wretched and soul-famished wight clawing his way out of the northern ice — no matter what.  And so it would come to be that Corwin would be lost at sea, slain during a pitched naval battle by his old privateer mentor who had come to punish him for turning away from the Privateer's Code and taking up a life of high seas piracy.

So House Ainsley's motto — "Laurifer Ultra Mors" ("Victorious Beyond Death") — has taken on a new meaning in light of the star-crossed house's demise and return.  Or was it foreshadowing all along?

Sadly, Corwin's player hasn't posted any actions for Corwin since 2011, and it looks like he won't be posting anytime soon.

I definitely could have worked on this doodle's shading some more.  And did my scanner suck or what?

Meh.  Just some cruddy Paint Shop Pro work I did.  I really should complete the entire family tree in this style one of these days....

More computer doodley: A treasure map which Corwin found during his adventures.  There was a time when I drew all of my maps by hand, but it was such a pain.  Now, I have Paint Shop Pro to help me make the world maps, Campaign Cartographer to churn out the odd overland map or two, and Gametable to handle the dungeon maps, city maps, wilderness encounter maps and anything else which uses a grid.

Grafitti scrawled in blood by some diseased maniac afflicted with a strange pestilence called the Laughing Death.  Found by Sylvea Aringerille (Player Character, Wood Elf Cleric of Evening Glory) and her sister Ariean (Henchman: Sylvea's murdered sister, reanimated as a ghoul by Sylvea's temple) as they delved deeper into Palemare's sewers in search of whatever may be causing or sustaining the Laughing Death.

I'm getting better with this computer doodley stuff.  Really!


My campaign also has a few "treasure hunt" aspects, where players and their characters may find special items during their adventures: Rare coins, the collectible pieces from a rumored magic item called Marbol's Magical Chess Set and the scattered pages of a lost book titled "The Cold Womb: Al-Shadan's Journal on the Undead," written by Yurel ben Al-Shadan, a Paladin of Pelor who devoted his life to studying, hunting and exterminating the undead and cataloguing his discoveries about undeath in all its forms.  As the undead are central to my Evil-Alignment-centric "The Fall and Rise of the House of Ainsley" campaign as both its protagonists and its antagonists, someone who gathered all of the pages and completely restored a single copy of The Cold Womb would have a very useful collection of knowledge, as well as whatever power and influence come with it.

Thus far, the player characters have only recovered four of The Cold Womb's 74 entries.

The Foreword, depicting the author — First Sunsword Yurel ben Al-Shadan — in his later years, still hard at work in the desert wastes of his homeland.

Al-Shadan's journal entry on the Skeleton, a common undead nuisance in many a dungeon.

Al-Shadan's journal entry on the Slaymate, the unsettling remains of a tragic child who lived a short life and died a miserable death.

Al-Shadan's journal entry on the Deathlock, a "poor man's lich" reanimated by the arcane powers which he once commanded in life.

(Ugh, that deathlock.  I really should have made her left leg just a smidgen longer, huh?    )

Okay, I've hogged this topic for long enough.  Now impress me with your doodles!  Who has doodles?  Show me your doodles!  

[Wids]

About 13 years ago, I was very active on Cryptic Studios' City of Heroes MMO as well as City of Heroes' "expanshalone" MMO, City of Villains.  You could install either MMO by itself and play it, or you could install both for twice the server world and twice the character options.  Then later on, the Going Rogue expansion came out and all of the main Archetypes (or "classes") became available to both sides, so Blasters, Controllers, Defenders, Scrappers and Tankers could become supervillains, and Brutes, Corruptors, Dominators, Masterminds and Stalkers could become superheroes.  And it was great.  And then CoX was killed in its prime so that NCSoft — the producers — could make yet another swords-and-sorcery MMO about half-naked women and really big swords.  It bombed hard, of course.

Happy trails, City of Heroes/Villains.  

Anyway, CoX doodles.

A doodle which I doodled back in 2006, during my City of Heroes heyday.  Another player on the Virtue server played Tarberetta (the catwoman on the left, Longsword/[Something else] Scrapper).  I played The Widowed (the black-leather-wearing Kung Fu widow with the duster hat and the eyepatch on the right, Martial Arts/Super Reflexes Scrapper).

I forget why I made this.  But look at all those scratchy pencil strokes!  Did my sketchy skills suck back then or what?  

SPOILER: Click to show

About a year later, I coughed up this not-even-close-to-finished gem of Bloodywedd (my main supervillain, Mind Control/Psionic Assault Dominator) fighting Dragonberry (the player Scarfgirl's main superhero, Spines/Regeneration Scrapper) in Bloody Bay, one of the PvP zones which joined Liberty City (the City of Heroes part of the world) with the Rogue Isles (the City of Villains part of the world).  Bloodywedd and Scarfberry had a long-standing rivalry brewing for years (in part because Bloodywedd was a psychotic, psychic, psionic psychologist and Scarfberry was a psychic manifestation born from some little girl's particularly vivid imagination), but Scarfgirl and I were and still are friends, so it's cool.  There were quite a few PvP fights through the years.  Sometimes Dragonberry won, sometimes Bloodywedd won.  All in good fun. 

As their first duel took place in the skies over Bloody Bay (since both of them could fly), the background for this doodle was supposed to be the top view of a bunch of skyscrapers, leading down to the streets below.  Can you imagine how many windows I would have had to draw?  Maybe I was being a touch ambitious with that idea.

Just some unfinished doodle of Bloodywedd being her usual evil, murderous, deranged self. 

I was pretty bad at finishing my projects back then.

So City of Heroes/Villains eventually came up with a parallel universe filled with characters who were the opposite of their counterparts in our world; superheroes here became supervillains there, and vice-versa.  So some time after the CoX community heard about Cryptic Studios planning on adding this shadow world to the MMO, I cranked out some supervillain-on-supervillain action with this doodle of Winnowing Abby (a supervillain version of my Scrapper, The Widowed) fighting...I think his name was something like Red Harvest.  His superhero version was Strawman, and Strawman and the Widowed hung out a lot, so this doodle was meant to be.  I can't even remember Strawman's player's user name now!  Sad, isn't it?

A few other players made their own artwork of Bloodywedd and the Widowed over the years. One time, one of the Guru community's artists named Poison (Manuel Clavel in real life; I'm linking his sweet art commission website right here) covered pretty much everyone — one Hero and/or one Villain from each player, preferably their mains — in this magnificent inky magnum opus of a doodle.  Widdy and Bloody are somewhere in that mob.  So's Dragonberry.  See if you can find them!

And lo, I was humbled.  Seriously, I was humbled.  In more ways than one.  I suck compared to some of those other players!  I really need to up my game!

[Wids]

So earlier this year, I was over on the Gaia Online forums and I decided that I was going to earn the Inquisitor achievement, which is awarded to anyone who creates a poll which earns at least 100 votes.  While most Gaians attempt this achievement by posting a one-option poll which goes something like "Hey, I'm trying to get Inquisitor, so click this!", I just have to be more complicated than that.  So I conjured up another Internet Death Match, one which pitted four Disney villains — with different yet roughly equal power levels — head-to-head, Thunderdome style:

• Maleficent (the spurned, vengeful faerie from Sleeping Beauty, 1959)
  
• Maximilian (Doctor Reinhardt's evil enforcer robot from The Black Hole, 1979)
  
• Rinzler (the hero of the first TRON movie subverted to CLU's cause, TRON: Legacy, 2010)
• Tamatoa (the colossal monster crab and nemesis to the hero Maui, Moana, 2016)

And yes, to avoid the contest boiling down to a mere popularity contest (which Maleficent would surely win, just because she has been around the longest), I did a fairly thorough job of detailing the strengths, weaknesses and inclinations of all four combatants.  Maleficent won anyway, alas.

So at one point, one of the more intelligent and insightful Gaians in that debate mentioned that Prince Philip wouldn't have stood a chance against Maleficent without the help of those three fairies, and that Flora, Fauna and Merryweather were the real heroines of Sleeping Beauty.  So I had to do a quick doodle about the poor, unloved deuteragonists in each of the four same Disney movies which gave us the combatants of that deathmatch:

I did a subtle job with the shading...too subtle.  My scanner barely picked it up!


And that was after the same Gaian suggested that Maleficent could easily win the battle if she could conjure a giant pit underneath the combatants, something which we couldn't consider anyway, as we've never seen Maleficent exhibit such an ability.  Besides, it wouldn't work well.  The short form answer: Tamatoa might fall in if the pit were wide enough, but Maximilian would ignore it completely (since he's hovering or flying constantly) while Rinzler would simply conjure his light jet mid-plummet and fly back out.  So the pit would only be about 33% effective, at most.

Anyway, I have a thing for Internet Deathmatches, and it's roughly as strong as my thing for Disney villains.  

[Wids]

Hey. Hey, Disaster!

Here's the thread.

[Wids]

I should probably put a mirror thread in General Discussion for any doodles that are related to Savage Frontier itself.  What do you think?

Anyway, three Tuesdays ago, Maralah finally succeeded where Barleigh, Ashanti and Lilibeza had all failed: She entered Llorkh Mine #1, she cleaned the dungeon out, she fought the ettin who serves as the dungeon's boss and she helped herself to the arch-ettin's treasure hoard.

Victory!  Huzzah! 

So then I got an introduction to the mine in Four-Eyed Ridge when Maralah soonafter just so happened to make her way over there.  And apparently, either Baghgh Cafghper isn't a name so much as it is a title, or Baghgh is really good at coming back from the dead and racing adventurers from one dungeon to the next.  I'm thinking that "Baghgh Cafghper" might be a title of some sort.  Or haven't you noticed that ettins on this server have names that go something like "Joe and Fred the Ettin"?

So once again, Maralah was forced to show the ettin mine boss the error of his ways.  

It was a pretty momentuous day for Maralah and myself.  And so I finally submitted to the urge to grab my sketchy doodley pencils and commemorate the occasion more elegantly than a bunch of screenshots. 

I just got the line work down at this stage; next come erasures and corrections (ie. Maralah's neck needs some work, and Baghgh's left head's eye is a bit too big), the background, detail work (ie. wood grain in the spear and the club, grime on the soles of Baghgh's feet, the rest of Maralah's fingernails and toenails), a "special effect" or two (seeing as Maralah had several buffs running both times when she toppled Baghgh), broad shading, fine shading and whatever the heck else needs attention.

To be continued, right?  Bear with me.  

[Wids]

Oh, yeah...I was supposed to be finishing that Maralah doodle, wasn't I?

Anyway, I don't know if it counts, but I threw this together to illustrate the layers of the Underdark for the benefit of my play-by-forum D&D 3.25 campaign and its players:

Apologies for the artifacts and other blurry, scrambled bits; JPEG is an awful format and I really need to stop using it.  (Yes, it's a PNG now.  I changed the format to limit the damage, but it still feels like locking up the stables after the horses have bolted.    )

Anyway, Maralah.  Where are my pencils...?

[Wids]

Oops, I did it again (albeit with the Underdeep instead of the Underdark)!

...and this time, I remembered the friggin' PNG format!