wkakadrac

[wkakadrac]

[wkakadrac]

Crossposting some Night Lords musings

Some rambling in relation to 40K / 30K [Predominantly around the Night Lords Legion] below the cut-off.

Art from 3rd Edition Chaos Space Marines Codex / Index Astartes.

Something I have come to consider a disappointment of sorts is the missed potential when it comes to the Night Lords Legion.

On one hand, they fill a niche that is absolutely needed to drive home the horrors of the Imperium of Man. Even with the most generous interpretations of the Emperor and his Great Crusade, you have an unsightly blemish in the form of the Night Lords being a useful bunch of self-serving monsters that the Emperor tolerated / was willing to entertain a blindspot for as long as he could pretend Curze wasn't That Bad and they got results. And again that's with the most generous interpretations: The Emperor unintentionally making a Leopards Eating People's Faces While The People Are Still Alive Legion and and tolerating it out of pragmatism. The more common / neutral implication being that he absolutely knew what they were doing [wanted them doing it, no less!] and signed off on it because they shaved a couple years off the Crusade atrocities be damned. The worst that he didn't care whatsoever about it and the only reason the Night Lords were abnormal was that they merely didn't pretend to be what they aren't.

This is a vital niche to fill when it comes to displaying the fucked up society that is the IoM and how even in its "Golden Age" there was stinking shit beneath that veneer of gold. You just... don't get it, for most of the other Legions. Especially in newer lore. GW has spent a bunch of effort to try and make the other Legio more 'human' [despite them being post-human galactic conquerors]. Especially with GW reducing so many other baddies into "lol it was Chaos / possession / insanity". The IoM needs something to have been a terrible blemish that cannot be conveniently blamed on Chaos or One Bad Apple Spoiling The Rest [Curze, quite explicitly, hates his Legion, and in many cases the feeling's mutual outside a respect for his capacity to do and enabling of Horrible Things].

But on the other hand. On the other hand. It writes itself: Really? Really? We are supposed to take it at face value that Nostramans are just built different, pay no mind to the sheer coincidence the moment Curze ceded Nostramo to the Emperor's Great Crusade they slid immediately back into the same lopsided government he had overthrown, and that The Administratum Couldn't Do Anything About It the inequalities just rapidly reasserted themselves crime magically skyrocketed after the removal of one single person, and on top of this the Societal Undesirables just coincidentally kept filtering into the Legion?

You have a world - no, I apologize: Explicitly an entire system: Night Lord lore explicitly mentioned in the old Index Astartes how he found out from a system's prosperity soaring - that in the span of a singular generation had its inequalities removed by the removal of every single despot that Curze didn't think he could press his thumb down on hard enough to play nice in the new system, and with Curze's removal the Administratum... magically couldn't do the same job as one person to keep at least one star system from falling back into the same groups' hands? And for that matter practically everyone that system recruited after the first generation was a bunch of horrific baby-eating self-serving murdering societal rejects who had no concern for anyone beyond He Himself And Him?

While 40K absolutely needs somebody to show that the Great Crusade's shit stunk too, that it was an interstellar bunch of murderers and ne'erdowells draped in the legitimacy and glory of a gilded despot, there was just as much potential to use them as a stepping stone of "Gee. It sure is convenient that the Imperium Did Its Best but Some People Are Just So Bad that despite giving them everything they could have ever wanted they still bit the hand that fed them". Or, for that matter, to introduce Traitor Marines who are just. Like. People who grew up watching their star system abolish economic and social inequalities. Dared to buy into the hype of such spreading through the galaxy. And then watched everything crumble around them. With stark division between those whom this broke, those who in desperation [for better or worse] threw their lot in with the Chaotic Powers... and those who just keep the legend of the original Night Haunter alive. Astartes who prowl the edges of Imperial Space and just.... topple the Noble Houses. Convince planets to throw off the yoke of Imperial Rule, whether in good faith or even just to try and make ever more fires for the IoM to have to put out [and thus increasing the odds of something slipping through the cracks or the inadequacies of the system catching up with it].

Adding onto this with some musings from other posts I fully understand that Curze's brutality was brought about by excessive and violent terror. Even the most benign interpretations of his rule over Nostramo pitch him as a murderous vigilante prone to violent fits. But that's fine! There's layers to how somebody like Curze could still call out the Emperor and other Great Crusade's architects / 'greatest' participants precisely and accurately. How Corax seemingly [in newer lore] likewise abandoned their revolutionary leans and within a matter of generations was actively reinforcing Deliverance's former system of exploitation, the two really being mirrors / foils for one another. Works have already established that Curze hates what he and his Legion have become [that the feeling is mutual] and that whatever noble intentions he might have had at any one point he's just as deserving of an executioner's blade well before the Heresy.

I guess I'm just disappointed that the Night Lords were reduced to a singular, unironic and straight-faced hat while every other Legion is given kiddy gloves to go "And that's why Chaos ruined everything". It diminishes the horrors of the Great Crusade, goes uncomfortable places with the idea of Some People Are Just Born Criminal And It Can Be Measurably Tracked In The Genome, and removes the potential for several thematic hooks.

#Night Lords #40K #30K #Warhammer 40000 #Great Crusade #Ave Dominus Nox

[wkakadrac]

Gunshot, Hop, Javelin Mint, Perfume, Satiate Shrink, Sleepy, Stun

Assimilated abilities from Brave Fencer Musashi (1998, Squaresoft, PS1) Dumped textures, reassembled.

Either by Tetsuya Nomura, or Koji Matsuoka (likely the latter, but I can't find much of his art to compare; if you ask me these sort of resemble the work of Akihiko Yoshida, but he's not credited anywhere for the game, so it must not be). If they're by someone else, I'd like to know.

Part 2 / Part 3

[wkakadrac]

B.O., Firefly, Bowl, Sublime, Fence, Map, Clone, D-Kick, Hurl, Steel

Assimilated abilities from Brave Fencer Musashi (1998, Squaresoft, PS1) Dumped textures, reassembled.

Either by Tetsuya Nomura, or Koji Matsuoka (likely the latter, but I can’t find much of his art to compare; if you ask me these sort of resemble the work of Akihiko Yoshida, but he’s not credited anywhere for the game, so it must not be). If they’re by someone else, I’d like to know.

Part 1   /    Part 3

[wkakadrac]

Toxin, Rip-Off, Acid, Depress, Antidote, 3-Way, Homing, Grenade

Assimilated abilities from Brave Fencer Musashi (1998, Squaresoft, PS1) Dumped textures, reassembled.

Either by Tetsuya Nomura, or Koji Matsuoka (likely the latter, but I can’t find much of his art to compare; if you ask me these sort of resemble the work of Akihiko Yoshida, but he’s not credited anywhere for the game, so it must not be). If they’re by someone else, I’d like to know. Part 1  /   Part 2

[wkakadrac]

[wkakadrac]

[wkakadrac]

Hello everyone! After some interest from fans over time, I am now releasing some of my Ecco the Dolphin fanart over at Inprnt! More images to come in the future as well as original artwork. :D

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/atolm/

[wkakadrac]

Re:Warhammer The Old World

Since some people might recall my older posts on Tumblr being on Warhammer-related matters, and having poured easily $1000-$2000 USD between when I entered in 2001 and left in 2013, I feel like I’d be a bit negligent if I did not offer my opinions on the announcement for Games-Workshop bringing back the Warhammer Fantasy line.

Are you ready?

I’m tentative. Not tentatively optimistic, not tentatively excited, just tentative.

On the one hand, Warhammer Fantasy had something... unique, if you will, to a bit of its fantastical flair. It was a rather decently fleshed out fantastical world fit for mainstream production but also took efforts to differentiate itself from a lot of its competition. Its mainstay human Empire was notably - predominantly - Germanic in inspiration, for example, and the technology generally hovered somewhere between “On the cusp of Pike and Shot” to “Solidly Pike and Shot” depending on which books you read. The Elves were not the oldest race, but instead the Lizardmen were (who, for that matter, had both the traditional “Simple cold blooded warrior-beast” thing going for them with the Saurus and Kroxigors but also “Functional society with sophisticated artisans and philosophy” with the Skinks, too). 

It featured Bretonnians who went all in on some of the more superhuman aspects of Arturian Legend. It featured the start of the “Big, green, musclebound Orcs” trend (much of the portrayals before tending to be more blatantly porcine and / or ‘broken’ Elf in nature). It had Not!Ancient Egyptian who were explicitly polytheistic and made use of chariots who at times even lead mortal kingdoms instead of doing nothing but brooding in ancient pyramids planning the death of Lion-Oh. It had... I think you get the point. There was a lot of interesting lore aspects to it.

Not only that, the setting was generally rich in lore (surprisingly so for a mere war-game). Supplements like the Liber Chaotica / Necris, the complex history of Dwarves and Elvish mythology, how a lot of army books originally spent literally dozens of times as much length providing narrative hooks as they did rules (and sometimes even having as much pages of alternate rules / army lists as base rules, so as to give armies more unique flair).

This was stuff that caught my interest when I picked up the hobby ages ago, both in a way that 40K just couldn’t satisfy as well as missing some of the aspects I came to eventually recognize as... rather concerning / problematic. Not missing it outright by any means, but being less obvious / prolific.

But that brings me to exactly where I feel like the Warhammer Fantasy revival could be... less than inspiring. Horrifying, even.

Warhammer Fantasy is a setting that makes no effort to hide that its map is - barring a few subtle and not-so-subtle changes - a rather blatant mimic of our own. You have Not!Europe, situated above Not!Africa and connected to Not!Asia. Across the ocean you have the Not!Americas, broken up into familiar Not!North and Not!South American versions. There are nations such as “Ind”(ia) and “Arabay”, and the aforementioned Not!Egyptians. The faction settled in Not!South America blatantly cribs off various Mesoamerican aesthetics, the one on the Not!Steppes from pop culture Mongols, the Not!Russians going so far as to borrow terms like Cossack, etcetera.

This in and of itself is not horrifying. Warhammer Fantasy wears this openly on its sleeve, and it provides some ease in identifying / characterizing things without having to flesh them out too explicitly in text. 

Where it does become problematic is how... shall we say, regressive a lot of the major Wargaming communities are, as well as how some of the lore has been handled. And how this might interact with things such as... say, a once powerful faction re-awakening and deciding to forcibly expel the outsiders, reclaim their stolen wealth, and make their nation powerful again. Or how a certain landmass is presented as being populated predominantly by Green-skinned savages who almost universally throw spears (let alone the formal name for their Bolt Thrower war machines), wear war paints, and operate in tribal structures. How one of the major four Chaos gods is heavily coded to represent - in an unfavorable light - the LGBTQ+ spectrum. How another of the major Chaos gods is blatantly - explicitly - referred to in older lore in a manner synonymous with signs of abuse... and has increasingly been whitewashed as being “The good one” or “The only one who truly loves you” or “Hurting his followers because he loves them” in an unironic light. 

Basically, there is an ungodly amount of room for things to - if handled either less than tactfully or even just mindlessly carried back over without any revision - go terribly wrong, and that’s without assuming purposefully hostile intent!

From a business standpoint, it’s relatively easy for WHFB’s revival to become a sort of money printing exercise for GW. Outside on-demand square bases and publishing some additional books, there’s relatively minimal work that needs to be done for such an endeavor due to the cross-compatibility between lines (Daemons are by default meant for 40K and AoS / Fantasy, for example, and a lot of the AoS line remains old WHFB ones repurposed for AoS). 

But from a community / Lore standpoint, I cannot help but see so many potential areas this revival could enable some of the worst aspects of modern Wargaming communities. Warhammer 40K was never exactly spotless, but it at least had a degree of separation due to the Sci-Fi veneer. Warhammer Fantasy has the real-world expies baked in.

#Warhammer Fantasy #Warhammer Fantasy Battles #WHFB #Warhammer The Old World

[wkakadrac]

EVERYONE

HAPPY 20TH BIRTHDAY TO SOUL REAVER!!! One of the best videogames ever made! 💙💙💖💖

[wkakadrac]

Happy anniversary to the best opening cutscene of all time!

[wkakadrac]

Decided to do a fun personal project where I illustrated the original PlayStation cover design of Soul Reaver in my own style.

I absolutely love the Legacy if Kain franchise and I wanted to pay tribute to the game that introduced me to the land of Nosgoth!

[wkakadrac]

My piece for @theyetee’s Damage Boost zine series. The debut volume is titled “JUMP” and focuses on that theme within classic video games. More info here: https://youtu.be/jxQNhObWdMM

[wkakadrac]

I’ve always wanted to do some real BFM fanart, and after a long time of trial and error, experiencing a 2 year long art slump, and finally finding my own art direction, I’ve done it.

[wkakadrac]

[wkakadrac]

oh, the sudden nostalgia

[wkakadrac]

This GAME. 20 years.

Truth to be told, THIS GAME inspired me to become an artist, both a game artist and a comic artist. Thanks to this game, I found Tetsuya Nomura.

HAPPY 20TH ANNIVERSARY YA LITTLE TURD

(Yes, I am aware Nomura-sensei didn’t do all that beautiful artworks in the credits; just the character designs.)

(ALSO REALLY, WHO HONESTLY EXPECTED SQUARE ENIX TO EVEN REMEMBER, I’M STILL SHAKING WITH HAPPINESS)