Hot Modrons 2: Polyhedral Boogaloo! [TG Art Thread]

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Hot Modrons 2: Polyhedral Boogaloo! [TG Art Thread]

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

How did you decide which ones were half orcs, and which ones were just plain orcs?

# ¿ Apr 4, 2022 09:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 21, 2024 15:03

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Here are some sketches I've done for my games over the last few years.

DELTA GREEN

Imperial United States Building

Self portrait of the artist

ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES

Coal City

Mama Bear, leader of the Ursus Cult

The Fat Sun Mercenaries of Coal City

Anticline, Emissary of the Lithic Kingdoms

Fairy Knight of the Unseelie Court

Men in Black

Keepers of the Coal City Underground Library

The Don of the Ponda Ray crime family, interrupted in his office

A Flagellant Spirit

Father of the Red Caps, an Unseelie crime family, carving up a table at the nightclub Blood For Sex

Man in Black locked in combat with a Paradox Beast

Seaxeneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian, of the rival adventuring party Speedfreaks Underground

Reed "Buckshot" Reeve, ibid

Cow Town

Adrian the Exploring Kid of the Exploration Project, later Adrian the Puissant Sorcerer of the Occultists

Radna the Arachnophile of the Exploration Project

Carl the Rock, Earth Mage of the Exploration Project

Fledgling Vampire of the Tattoos, a vampire bloodline of Cow Town

Doctor Klay, Physician to the Exploration Project

Lester Bean, Dungeon Butcher and Friendly Cannibal

Slaughterhouse Worker and Meat Cultist

United Meat Train Executive and Security Officer, observing the Meat Cult

A horror from the Abattoir

Commemorative bust of Carl after his death raiding a vampire nest

Radna post-transformation

Commemorative bust of Radna after her suicide-by-player-character

Meat Cultists on the offensive. A Meat Collar Worker, Slaughterhouse Worker, and Tallow Titan

Salt Bay

Salt Bay Map

Surf Wizard at the Beach Noodle shack

UNKNOWN ARMIES

Adrian LeBarge, the con artist who robs cultists

Yoshida the Cleaner, wiping up a jumper on the Nagoya Main Line

Yoshida at Roses' Bar

Shoggos the Unspeakable Servant, disguised in a mascot costume for the dumpling truck

Lucretia "Lucky" Tudor, old money ritualist and clone-mother of Rachel the Merchant

# ¿ Apr 10, 2022 21:35

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Halloween Jack posted:

I need to know absolutely everything about the United Meat Train

United Meat Train was the Rupture Farms style factory farm that de-facto ran Cow Town, a vast hive of agribusiness. They had a series of abattoirs on the South side of town where they turned cattle into various meat products. They dumped the offal into a massive pit called The Sink, Pathologic style. The sheer amount of death and dead bodies, combined with ambient magical energy from all the secret tombs and magic ruins under the town, caused a necromantic singularity. This infected the slaughterhouse workers, borging them into a meat cult dedicated to feeding more and more flesh into the hole. The UMT suits thought they could control it and use it for marketing purposes, but ended up subverted themselves, acting as an intelligence gathering "brain" for the mindless Meat God. Since the Cow Town police effectively worked for UMT, the meat cult was also able to coopt the town's law enforcement into procuring human victims to feed the hole. They were further aided by the Tattoos, a bloodline of bloated vampires who believed they would be allowed to feed freely once humanity was reduced to barely sentient cattle, and by the Grange Association, a collection of farmers who ended up serving the meat cult as expendable janissaries after their leadership was conscripted.

United Meat Train Headquarters

The Meat God and its servitors were eventually defeated by a coalition of mages, cultists, explorers and artists from the Cow Town underworld. The resistance fighters set up a network of magic paintings across the undercity that let them move around town quickly without using the surface, which was controlled by the meat cops. In the final battle, a team of Cthugha Cultists incinerated the Sink by using Druid drugs to plug their minds and bodies directly into the Great Lord of Embers, while a team of elite saboteurs from the Seekers of the Path infiltrated United Meat Train's offices and destroyed their logistical and communications infrastructure in a brutal floor-by-floor battle.

Two choices for entering the meat offices

If you'd like to know more you can read the full series of play reports here.

Frakas posted:

oh my loving god these are good, thank you so much

Really glad you like them.

Just for that, have a few more.

DUNE 2D20

Beg MacAdder at Tam of House at Tam

Iron Maiden in the service of House Thoss, wearing a suit of suspensor armor

Rug, Wild Mentat and leader of the Servile Revolt on Gamont, sporting a distinctive wicker "sheathe"

Rug after his promotion to Consul of the Free Shooters, sheathe upgraded to a fine codpiece

FALLOUT

Kurt, leader of the Seafair Pirates of Drowned Seattle

Edison, Bartender and Master Distiller at the Sea Needle

Hugo, "Curator" of the Pima Air and Space Museum in Two Sun

ASSORTED D20 FANTASY

Mind Flayer, Fighter, Beholder

Evil Dwarf Cleric from an abortive 5E game

Ed Skinner, Cleric of Abadar (my first PFS character)

Monk whose name escapes me, rejected PFS character

Paladin, ibid

CYBERPUNK 2020

Agent CARBONARA, corrupt cop

Ibid

ROGUE TRADER

Woman From Volta the Arch Militant

Ibid

Ginfiz the Ork Freeboota, dressed in the livery of a Praetorian

Ibid

Misc Voidsman

Ibid

# ¿ Apr 12, 2022 00:56

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Found my old one page dungeons.

I cheated and made this one a two parter

# ¿ Apr 14, 2022 01:14

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Thank you everyone for the kind words.

w00tmonger posted:

These are great. A thick book of these would be sick as hell

I need to start doing them again, and maybe even submit one to the contest. These are all from years ago. Drawing detailed backgrounds with perspective (even rudimentary) is a skill that I've let atrophy through disuse.

Halloween Jack posted:

The illos and your blog are jaw dropping and you should publish stuff if you haven't already !

I have thought about doing a book of my Esoteric Enterprises houserules and custom content. The base game is Creative Commons so there aren't any legal issues with releasing my own spin. I just need to teach myself Scribus or one of the other PDF builders, then actually sit down and do layout.

Cpt_Obvious posted:

The art is a lot of fun and the style reminds me of super jail, one of my all time favorite cartoons.

One thing I quite like about the visuals in Superjail is the insane amount of detail the artists pack into shots that are only on screen for a couple seconds before the camera snaps to something else. This is also probably why so many people find it nauseating to watch. It's easy to dismiss the show as just sensory overload with buckets of gore when you only have a few frames of animation to appreciate the actual craft that goes into it.

DressCodeBlue posted:

All your stuff is delightful but, as a squid connoisseur, I just want to highlight how rad that illithid is ~~even though they're defective with too many fingers and should be culled~~.

Perhaps s/he is the normal one, and it's all the other squids who are deviants. Or perhaps I didn't use any reference images when I drew it.

Here are some additional doodles that I found digging through my Google Photos account.

ESOTERIC ENTERPRISES

Commemorative bust of Wayne the Pyromancer, a fire mage (but not a fire cultist) from Cow Town

Abbey the Aboleth, leader of the Coal City Leviathan Cult, expressing her opinion of the player characters

DELTA GREEN

Agent TEUTON, Case Officer

Bones the cultist, enjoying himself at a cannibal barbeque

Spider, ibid

LAUNDRY FILES RPG

Argo Klamm, agency shoggoth handler.

Argo Klamm, detail of implanted ANNING BLACK TEA control organ

FALLOUT

Five Seventy trooper (military ghoul cultist guarding a Titan missile site South of Two Sun, AZ)

Five Seventy trooper sporting a power fist and tac rig (powered exoskeleton sans armor)

Five Seventy heavy weapons guy

MISC FANTASY

Sketch of the City from Tales of the Fleshsmith, and aborted reboot of the first fantasy setting I ever wrote. The towers at the top belong to the Symphony of Flesh, the group of mages who discovered fleshsmithing and kicked off the anatomical revolution. To the right of that is the walled enclosure of the Great College, one of the City's two schools of anatomy. On the left, above the pier, is the Lighthouse, a vanity project made from the recycled pyroclasm gland of an ancient dragon. The area enclosed by the wall with the regular grid of squares is the saltstead, a section of seabed raised to the surface and seeded with halotolerant plants and animals to provide food for the City. The big cleared area below that, to the right of the crane, is the try-works, a huge meatcamp where the corpses of magical creatures are chop shopped for parts. The monstrous organs are grafted into human beings to give them superpowers, or used in alchemical projects. The island in the upper right is the Plague Lab, where the most dangerous animalcular research takes place away from the city.

The rest of the city is various barber surgeries and alchemic shops, book stores and libraries, underground clinics, taverns and coffee shops, and an ever expanding ring of slums that house the neverending influx of peasants into the City. The Little University is in there somewhere, I don't remember which encircled cluster of buildings it is. It's the other college, the players were supposed to start as students there.

(If all this sounds slightly familiar, it's mostly ripped off Windup Girl, and a Eurocomic called Dungeon)

mellonbread fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Apr 19, 2022

# ¿ Apr 19, 2022 00:09

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Some more Dune 2d20 illustrations based on the last couple sessions.

FLAME CATAPHRACTS
Mercenaries who ride suspensor bikes and use flame weapons to slowly cook foes inside their shields via heat diffusion.

Trooper on suspensor bike.

Alt design with a bulkier chassis and a more "aggressive" posture

SULFUR DRAGOONS
Mercenary army that saturates the battlefield with chemical weapons, slowly diffusing through enemy shields and killing on skin contact. Their concoctions are carefully formulated to incorporate only poisons permitted under the Great Convention.

Trooper

Suspensor platform with sprayer

Alternate design iterating on the "dragoon" concept - quick detach suspensor backpack for delivering the trooper to the battle, guided by a basic control stick held in the hand.

# ¿ May 2, 2022 19:36

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

I commissioned some illustrations of mercenaries from my Dune 2d20 game.

Rifle Infantry does great sci fi, fantasy and vehicles.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2022 00:12

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Thufir Hawat posted: posted:

"Nonsense! By your argument, I could recruit from among the Fremen after the way they've been oppressed by my nephew."

Hawat spoke in a mild voice: "Don't you oppress any of your troops?"

"Well . . . I . . . but - "

"Oppression is a relative thing," Hawat said. "Your fighting men are much better off than those around them, heh? They see unpleasant alternative to being soldiers of the Baron, heh?"

The Baron fell silent, eyes unfocused. The possibilities - had Rabban unwittingly given House Harkonnen its ultimate weapon?

Presently he said: "How could you be sure of the loyalty of such recruits?"

"I would take them in small groups, not larger than platoon strength," Hawat said. "I'd remove them from their oppressive situation and isolate them with a training cadre of people who understood their background, preferably people who had preceded them from the same oppressive situation. Then I'd fill them with the mystique that their planet had really been a secret training ground to produce just such superior beings as themselves. And all the while, I'd show them what such superior beings could earn: rich living, beautiful women, fine mansions . . . whatever they desired."

The Baron began to nod. "The way the Sardaukar live at home."

"The recruits come to believe in time that such a place as Salusa Secundus is justified because it produced them - the elite. The commonest Sardaukar trooper lives a life, in many respects, as exalted as that of any member of a Great House."

"Such an idea!" the Baron whispered.

Rayyan I�timad, Commentaries on the Arrakis Affair posted:

FREMEN BRAVO
In the waning years of the Arrakis Affair, the Harkonnens made limited use of Fremen auxiliaries to augment their increasingly thin stretched regular forces. This decision was apparently prompted by the Baron's appreciation of the desert peoples' superb fighting ability (especially in hand to hand combat), their superior knowledge of the terrain, and the ruinous expense of shipping Harkonnen troops from Giedi Prime to reinforce their holdings on Arrakis.

Paul Muad'Dib made many enemies in his conquest of Arrakis, not all of whom were foolish enough to challenge him in personal combat (or be cut down by his consort before they reached the door of his yali). Not all Fremen were pleased with the way the Lisan Al Gaib unified the tribes. Others saw an opportunity to avenge ancient grudges against rival clans by allying themselves with the Imperial power.

Harkonnen soldiers killed anyone they saw wearing a stillsuit as a standard procedure. Especially during the heat of battle, when one blue-eyed dune man looked much the same as any other. To counterweight this, Fremen Bravos in the pay of the Harkonnens tended to wear overly ostentatious Harkonnen livery. While this made it impossible for them to conceal themselves, it reduced the odds of friendly fire, especially from Harkonnen air power.

As the war in the desert ground on, the Harkonnens armed an increasing portion of their troops with lasguns. Though they never issued a single laser weapon to a Fremen auxiliary, large numbers of lasguns found their way into the hands of Fremen Bravos. The rate at which these foederati acquired lasguns was approximately equal to the rate at which Harkonnen soldiers "went missing" on joint operations with their ostensible allies.

Following the fall of House Harkonnen and Muad'Dib's ascension to the Lion Throne, the majority of Bravos were slaughtered by the victorious Fremen. Many of the survivors, those who escaped into the deep desert, formed the nucleus of the resistance movement against the new Emperor's terraforming efforts, and later against the Regent Alia Atreides.

Lasgun and Stillsuit based on Rifle Infantry's Dune designs.

mellonbread fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Nov 21, 2022

# ¿ Nov 21, 2022 19:02