#sword and sorcery

[messias2049br]

[thedrinkingg33k]

One of my favorite reference/art books when I still thought I could draw.

Boris Vallejo, 1983

[dragon-realms]

The red haired she-Devil of sword and sorcery

[eightiesfan]

[a-space-opera]

[hecticelectron]

It’s been wonderful to see how @anonbeadraws reinterprets the characters that @thalieshelen created. I look forward to showing you everyone’s art in one place when the whole book is done.

Defy the Gods - Lay of the Land I finally get to show off some of the illustrations I made for Defy the Gods, made by @hecticelectron! Each piece was a lovely layering of research in mesopotamian architecture and clothing, I got to learn a few things and try and keep my work as factual as possible! Pre-order your copy here!

[neon-ufo]

Ire of Miladena A victory of pride and shame

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Conan the Barbarian - art by Doug Beekman (1970s, 1980s, 1990s)

[pikala]

The forest parts and the sword glows. Do you take it or leave it be?

[ninjajustice]

[curtvilescomic]

cover art for Kavin's World by Frank Frazetta

[prokopetz]

On the origin of oozes:

When googling it seems that ooze type enemies came about with dnd.

Are you aware of earlier origins? It does not seem farfetched to assume that some fantasy book had them before that.

(also, best ooze in your opinion?)

It's broadly correct that the ooze monster in its modern form comes to us via Dungeons & Dragons (with considerable influence from D&D-inspired Japanese console RPGs like Dragon Quest). However, like many other classic D&D tropes, its antecedents were present in the sword and sorcery literature of the 20th Century – ooze monsters just seem like they sprung into existence fully formed in D&D's monster manuals because nobody reads sword and sorcery lit anymore.

While there are no doubt earlier precedents, I'd be inclined to point to early 20th Century cosmic horror fiction as the point where the modern giant-amoeba-like notion of the ooze monster really became a standard trope. We can see a clear prototype of the modern ooze monster in Lovecraft's shoggoths, first described in detail in At the Mountains of Madness (1931), for example; from there, the line to the sword and sorcery literature that would go on to form the basis of Dungeons & Dragons is a short one. This certainly isn't the first example of the type – I just don't have an earlier one at my fingertips.

As for my favourite ooze monster, I've gotta give it to the gelatinous cube, one of the few examples of the type which truly is original to Dungeons & Dragons – in fact, it could only have come from D&D, owing to the peculiarities of its creation. It started out as a sort of dungeon hazard, an "invisible" ooze which concealed itself by being completely transparent and conforming perfectly to the shape of any passage that it occupied; however, since old-school D&D expected players to produce their own dungeon maps as they went, and made their job easier by abstracting dungeon floorplans onto a grid of ten-foot squares, the idea of the gelatinous cube quickly shifted from "ooze which perfectly fills any passage it occupies" to "ooze which evolved to be a perfect ten-foot cube in order to block a standard ten-foot-by-ten-foot dungeon hallway". It's incredibly dumb, and I love it.

[chernobog13]

Arnold Schwarzenneger as King Conan of Aquilonia.

[omercifulheaves]

Red Sonja Art by Frank Thorne

[gulmancer]