#Design Thoughts

[descendantofthesparrow]

im having thoughts

[thebrokenmechanicalpencil]

OK so yep turtle child. I seem to have fallen back into all my old artistic phases once again, Tmnt included in that roster.

I get a brain worm sometimes, it sits and annoys me and wont go away because of course I cant be inspired to draw normal things. Oh well, this is Mucha (pronounced Moo-kah) named after a painter from the art nouveau period. He is the son of our favorite leader in blue, Leo. YES ok wait before anyone gets me, no oc shipping made him. He and his cousin's were made through the art of ✨science✨

Lets say in the bay movies (because those have a soft spot in my heart I'm so sorry I know theyr kinda ugly-) some baddie gets the blood samples from the brothers and instead of trying to make a pandemic (havnt watched the movies in forever forgive me) they try recreating the experiment to try and create super soldiers (overused plot line dontworryaboutit) they mix the mutation agent with four turtles they have on standby, along with the DNA of each brother. Welp mutation happens but before they can get too far the boys swoop in thinking it was some sort of beep bop and rock steady situation. They discover the four recently mutated infant turtles and the rest goes from there.

sorta like the last Ronin but no sads, and before you know it the baby turtles have favorites and now they are sorta parent big brothers. As they get older and the babies grow they lean into the fatherly aspect. Or something.

Now this is the baby who gravitated toward Leo and he to him, and has Leo as a top roll model in his life. Sure all the boys help raise the new set, but again the kids all have favorites. Naturally. (I will mess with this later, but for now this is the wobbly idea) Well Mucha has Leo the stern when leading, silly when the weight is off his shoulders, overly bossy and slightly controlling Leo. Leo who would die for his family but can be cruel and very blunt. Who is also really young in his own right. Being the top role model for a child. Well they have a relationship were Mucha adores him, wants to be like him. But can never seem to live up to his expectations, tries so hard to impress him. He has a loving father figure who teaches him but also tries to helicopter him so much. Control so much, who is blunt when frustrated or angry. This kid is terrified of disappointing him, but wants deep within himself to impress his father his OWN way. Being Mucha not little Leo. He falls where Leo did when chosen as leader, under pressure without his parent even realizing it.

Leo does love him, but as we have seen he is a control freak. So his child naturally rebels, snapping and arguing with him when he's having a bad day. Not wanting to listen to him, because Leo wont listen to MUCHA. As Mucha gets older their relationship becomes strained.

K well I'm stuck in this now. This was mostly a thought post, read a thing about Leo wanting so badly to be a parent. Started wondering how it would go, will continue to work on this. Probably. The reason Mucha's art is so angsty is because that's where the pen went. Hes actually not that bad, usually.

OH well the second, white turtle. He gets his own post later :D

[celestiall0tus]

Late Night Design Thoughts:

I really love Beelzebub's design from Helluva Boss.

One, I do think it's a clever idea to base her off of a party girl instead of a typical depiction of someone that overindulges in food. Thought I'd still laugh if she was and still was that skinny because then it's basically just Shaggy Rogers. Pair that with the lava lamp midsection that burns up a lot of what she consumes and it's beautiful.

Her color palette, all three, are very pleasing to the eye, and a fun addition. I would say her color palette as the Queen of Gluttony like what we saw in Mastermind again is by far my favorite, though the blue light one was pretty too.

And, despite what I see a lot of people argue about, you can see the bee in her design. The antenna on her ears and eyelashes, the larger thighs and hip for the bee butt, her legs sharing the length and general shape of bee legs, the extra limbs to make six total limbs, the itty-bitty wings like a bee, and the lava lamp torso, hair, and tail looking a little like honey makes it all come together.

[loz-furbies]

Earlier I wrote down my thoughts on the other Zelda designs so let's do one for the new Zelda too.

First the princess dress. When the trailer first played out, with Zelda stuck in her crystal, I thought this was going to be some kind of OoT remake in the toy style since the Zelda design is so similar. But upon closer inspection it's more like a mix between the ALbW design and OoT design, with some TP thrown in as well with the top shape. Which is a big minus for me; I like when the characters have their own visual identity so this is quite boring for me. But I guess it's good that it's a unique design at all at least, unlike ALbW Zelda or many of the Links.

Then again the princess look is presumably not what she'll look like for the most of the game so it doesn't matter that much. As for her more casual look… it's okay. I'm just not a fan of the toy art style with the simplified details and beady eyes but that aside this design communicates just fine that this is a Zelda on an adventure. The cut of the dress is new, the boots look nice and sturdy and the cape originally belonging to Link (?) is a super cute detail.

[flightyquinn]

Been trying to think of a good basis for an Ice/Poison fakemon.

Along the way, I learned about the Comb Star and Crown-of-Thorns starfish. While I don't think that they're what I'm looking for, it was interesting to find both a five-pointed and a many-pointed spiny starfish, both known for their toxicity. Could make for a good inspiration for a regional form of Staryu and Starmie.

It's even better because both the Comb Star and the Crown-of-Thorns are native to the Indo-Pacific region IRL.

[tumblmon]

Took a break today from writing out monster attacks and started on a design for Cassette Beasts cards themselves and it's super fun!!!! My husband is helping me and I'm using a program specifically designed for card making so it's super easy and fun! Exactly the kind of shot in the arm that I needed for this project.

[jayahult]

Spell Alignment in TTRPGs

So. a while back I saw a post about D&D (and close cousins Pathfinder and similar games) and the sort of implicit problems with the morality systems of those games as it relates to magic. As a really basic example, a lot of spells are cordoned off as being considered basically, fundamentally evil, particularly if they relate to necromancy. From a meta perspective this sorta makes sense. The default party is assumed to be either explicitly on the side of the righteous or at the very least mercenary enough to realize that the Cult of the Demon of Backstabbing Machiavellianism are not good business partners, or some combination of the two. You cordon off certain spells to be "baddie only" and you can essentially tweak those abilities however you please and not really upset player balance, while still keeping the option open for an "evil" party.

The problem comes with how spells are labeled as "evil" and the sort of underlying implications of those labels. The classic example is raise dead. You take a corpse, and turn it into a mindless servant that does whatever you tell it to for a period of time. The underlying assumption here is sort of obvious: you're desecrating a corpse and using them as a slave, which is always an evil act. The problem is that this creates a dissonance with basically any contact with reality. The soul has already quit the body, left it behind, and the corpse is a shell. Animating raw clay or iron to serve you is a morally neutral act, but when that raw material used to be a person, it suddenly becomes taboo because of underlying assumptions the creators have about corpses, not because the act of using those raw materials is inherently immoral. And this isn't even getting into the fact that, theoretically, someone could willingly consent to have their corpse brought back as a servant. After all, in real life, people donate their corpses to science or to donate organs all the time. Plus, that servant could easily be used to do good or neutral acts. Nothing really prevents you from running a farm or building a house with undead servants besides maybe the fact that they've got bad ability scores for it. I guess you could argue that you're undercutting the pay of living workers, thus it's evil, but you get the idea.

This dissonance only gets amplified when you start looking at combat-oriented spells and classes that are cordoned off for being evil. To really get into the highest level of this disparity, we can look at The Book of Vile Darkness for 3rd Edition D&D. TBVD was designed explicitly as a sourcebook for more options for evil characters, whether in the party or on the DM side of the screen. Some of these spells make sense for why they're explicitly considered evil. For example, befoul and despoil poison and kill water and food supplies on a mass scale, something often considered a dick move across cultures. However, a lot of them are just... cartoonishly violent? Slash tongue is an eeeevil cantrip that instantly cuts your opponents tongue. It deals one whole point of damage and makes them take some penalties for a few rounds from pain. Sorrow is an eeeevil enchantment spell that makes someone really sad so they take a -3 on all rolls for like, a minute or two at most. Drown is an eeevil spell that makes a target's lungs instantly fill with with water, which you might think would instantly kill them but rules-wise it just makes them start to drown on dry land, with associated penalties to anything to do with speech using their lungs. My point is, when you look at a lot of these spells, they aren't inherently more evil than a lot of the stuff you'd give to players. Acid splash is a very basic spell available to a lot of spellcasters in most editions of D&D that does what it says on the tin: you splash magically-conjured acid onto a target, dealing acid damage to them. In real life, that would be called, you know, an acid attack, and is widely considered to be one of the more heinous forms of assault that can be performed on someone because in addition to being potentially lethal in the right circumstance, it can also leave someone with permanent, visible and disfiguring scars. Fireball, a mainstay of wizards throughout D&D history, is essentially an incendiary bomb that turns enemies into charcoal. The ways in which you could abuse dominate person or polymorph barely need mentioning. Perhaps most weird out of the bunch is the vermin lord - essentially a prestige class who functions sort of as a druid, but for bugs. And they're evil!... because bugs are gross? It's really unclear why vermin are inherently more evil than other animals besides sole, out of universe disgust factor on the part of the creators.

So, how do we resolve this problem in D&D? I dunno. I mean, let's be real here. D&D is not really the best TTRPG for the fineries of moral debate over whether your wizard is breaking international law by casting cloudkill. It's not really that sort of game in any edition. There aren't really hard and fast rules in the base game for determining what alignment particular actions fall into, just general ideas and concepts that are nebulous and shift from edition to edition and even adventure to adventure. The game, mechanically speaking, is not particularly interested in the exact morality of a character, and it's become less interested in this over time across editions. Paladins in 5e, for example, are no longer limited to being lawful good, instead having a specific code of conduct that they adhere to. And from a pure play perspective, I think this change is probably for the better. Without both a strong mechanical system and consistent outlook, all alignment does is 1) delineate what targets are acceptable, 2) delineate what mechanical options are available to certain kinds of players and 3) create arguments at the table with no answer in the rulebook that grind play to a halt.

(This whole myopia did incidentally inspire the only real D&D adventure that I'd like to run someday. The core hook is that one of the player's friends is being attacked by devils, and no one is quite sure why. The players do some fighting, try to figure out the mystery, and then eventually a higher-up from Hell intervenes. He apologizes and explains that the friend in question was targeted as part of a clerical error; a person who was trying to avoid damnation got confused with the friend, and he'll gladly pay for any damages - this sort of thing rarely happens anymore, the first slip-up in a few millennia. When the players inquire further, or get mad at his failure, he will explain the actual structure of the universe. It is, inherently and irrevocably "just." Every good person gets a good afterlife. Every bad person gets a bad afterlife. Every neutral person gets a neutral afterlife. In history, no good deed has ever gone unrewarded and no bad deed has ever gone unpunished. The gods actually engineered the exact scenario that allows adventuring parties like theirs to proliferate. This is because adventuring parties are able to deal with things like vampires, ghosts, liches and other semi-immortal creatures, which are seen as basically trying to "cheat the system" and get out of their just desserts. And then he reassures them that they're doing great work, leaves, and lets the party sort of stew in that revelation. Their reaction - hopefully to try to overturn the system - then becomes the overarching metaplot.)

There is something there to the design element of "action / morality tied abilities" in the context of TTRPGs, though. I think if you really wanted to go all out with it, you'd have to crib a bit from White Wolf-style morality bars, where players have sliding scales representing where they are morally, but instead of relating to humanity, it could relate to different kinds of and levels of magic. As you unlock more powerful abilities and magic, the restrictions you face are more and more stringent. A level one life magician can only take a life if it would prevent another person's death, whereas a level ten life magician has to literally watch where they step lest the crush an insect beneath their foot and lose some of their power. I think there's something there as a design idea that naturally plays into roleplaying.

[sanurasdoodles]

[Concept] Reworking Kain

If you want to see more like this please support me at Subscribestar / Ko-Fi When I first drew Kain for the Nova Space Crew I was going off of the first Image I drew of him, however I felt like how he looked didn't fit the personality I wanted him to have in the Nova Space Crew. So I wrote down some words that gave a bit of his personality and drew some shapes that I felt matched it, afterwards I implemented more of those shapes in to his designs and got a look that I felt more happy with. Designing stuff like this can be quite fun so if you guys are interested in seeing more of how I go about it let me know! Enjoy! Art drawn by Me Art, and Kain belong to Me 

Posted using PostyBirb

[cafeyote]

me and gang at the haunted house

[onebadnoodle]

🃏 hero villain 🦇

[o0kawaii0o]

M-miss nami sir...

[notasoupcompany]

[celestiall0tus]

So now that we've seen all the designs of the Seven Princes in Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, what do you think of each of their designs and the designs of their sigils (which can be seen here https://www.deviantart.com/moheart7/art/Hellaverse-The-7-Sins-of-Hell-1128188249)?

I'm being asked to give my design opinions on something? Holy shit

Rolls up sleeves Let's get into this!

I'm going to cover the sigils all in one because I have no real other opinion besides I like them. I think they did an amazing job incorporating the design of the sins and condensing it down into a sigil.

Now, the real shit

Satan:

I was honestly amazed with his design. I wasn't sure what we were going to get other than him loosely being based on the imps since most of the sins seem to reflect the demons they likely created, but for the man to be a dragon is the most metal thing ever. And the western aesthetic added in was just amazing. I love the reds and orange of his skin contrasted with the dark clothing. And the fact he is so big and intimidating works so well for the sin of wrath.

Beelzebub:

My favorite out of all of them because it's just beautiful. I love the lava lamp torso and hair, doubling that torso burning away the shit she consumes so she's never truly full is just fucking genius. Add to that her hair and tail kinda look a little like honey, the fennec fox motif is cute as shit, and despite what people say, there are definite bee motifs in her design. Her larger hips and thighs to be a bee butt, her legs shaped like bee legs instead of typical hellhound legs, her little bee wings, the antenna on her ears ad eyelashes, the extra arms, it's all there. And to make gluttony a party girl? I fucking love it. Better than the boring typical depictions of a fat ass that just pigs out all the time.

Mammon:

I hate this fucker so much, but he fits greed so well. Being this big, fat cat type of character just screams typical evil business CEO man from old school media that you knew immediately was the villain. Though him being a spider wasn't quite on my bingo card still, even with all the webs around and seeing him transform.

Asmodeus:

I loved Asmodeus from when we first saw him in Ozzie's. I loved seeing him being this big ass rooster (a cock) with his fancy feathers, extra little faces in his hair/feathers, the wide ass chest, everything about him has the swagger of a peacocking rooster. Which, I will say, it might have been interesting to see him as a peacock given the flamboyance of those birds and all the fancy to attract a mate, but we got a closeted Andrealphus, so I can't complain. I will say I'm not the biggest fan of Ozzie in disguise where he's this twink ass twig. It just looks unsettling, but I mean, it works, yeah? Oh! And can't forget the fiery form he takes that is just fucking amazing. I love that his role with the fire dancer or whatever it's called for the circus Luci once ran. Lust and love burn hot like a fire and I love it.

Leviathan:

This will be quick since we only saw a little of them, but I love them. I love the two faces, the two heads, them being the freak show, their colors are just so appealing. I love how the three big envy demons we've seen so far take after each of the heads, which makes sense because envy, they'd want to be like someone else and who better than their prince? Also, side note, I love that one of the heads was into Mammon and the other was like "Uh, yeah, no." It was honestly really cute and showed they are two separate people. I really hope we see more of them.

Belphagor:

Bel is so fucking cute! I really want to see more of her because she's too stinking cute! The bits of sheep inspiration because sleep, counting sheep, though I've seen people point out there's some llama or alpaca or something else with her longer neck (can't remember which one). I would definitely need to see more of her to give a greater opinion, but for now, I think she's fucking adorable.

And, saved the best for last, Lucifer:

The man of pride, the first fallen angel, the light bringer, the morning star, Lucifer. I love the design inspiration making him based off porcelain dolls. It gives this almost innocent but unsettling look (like the dolls themselves). The apple theme of him from his apple core tuxedo, staff, and on his hat are nice touches, love the snake wrapped around his hat, and his ducktail hair. It all just wraps up what he is and is rumored to be with the symbols that became associated with him, that may or may not be associated with him. The only thing that confuses me is his place in the hierarchy of heaven. He has six wings like the Seraphim, but I don't think he was a Seraph. I thought he might be one of the Cherubim, which are traditionally just below the Seraphim, but we've seen Cherubs, but I also don't know if they're exactly the same since Cherubim have four wings, not just two. There was also the consideration of an Archangel like Michael and the others, but the Archangels are amongst the lowest on the hierarchy with common angels just under them at the bottom. Granted things are likely different in Vivzie's version of heaven, but it still leaves me to wonder where Lucifer was in the hierarchy to have six wings. Also, side note, I thought Cherubim before because of him shapeshifting into different animals to fight Adam and the Cherubim are more animal in appearance (much like some of the Cherubs in the show) and Lucifer has a snake face shape. I thought this might contribute to why Charlie almost looks more dog-like? That's a topic for another time, but yeah, I love his design minus that one element that makes me question everything.

[yeepof]

Local PHD student at wizard school HARRASSED!! FOR SHAME!!

[sparrowlucero]

honestly i think a huge part of getting better at creature design is gaining an appreciation for "normal boring" animals and realizing that they also have evocative character designs that are just as good to draw from as tigers or deer or vultures or piranhas or anything else on the whole have deemed more charismatic or interesting looking in some way