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Happy 3rd official fanart Friday! Today we have this beautiful image of Anja in armor done by @coldbloodechoes on Instagram and tumblr!

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Nazusha Ilimesho - Shussar of Dòrok.

I want to talk a little bit about his design, namely his face and mask. An important distinction is to be made between Nazusha the Shussar and Nazusha the man. Nazusha’s face was designed to be ordinary and not “godly” like one would expect from a monarch. his hair is always unkempt from constantly wearing hats, and his appearance isn’t anything out of the ordinary for a Dòrok. Nazusha is simply just a man under all of his titles and prestige, a man who wants to live and experience things like any other. Nazusha’s mask on the other hand is a representation of the monarchy itself. The face that Nazusha wears as a ruler, stoic and imperceptible. Nazusha is usually masked, and most people do not know what he looks like underneath. Nazusha does this intentionally, as is his cunning nature, it makes him unknowable. Other world leaders find it hard to ascertain his motives and he is considered an enigmatic leader.

But remember, underneath the mask, Nazusha is simply a man.

Fun fact: Nazusha’s last name, Ilimesho, translates to something along the lines of farmer. This is because Nazusha’s father, Yarojin, was a farmer and Shepard before he took power. Nazusha is the second Shussar of Dòrok, and his family name is a peasant name.

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Happy second official fanart Friday! This collection of images of Nazusha is brought to you by @pretzel-bitz !

(The second image of Nazusha and baby Kitalupa are soooo cute, and I’ll never stop laughing about Nazusha, brushing his teeth with Dunkleosteus Picture taped to his mirror)

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The Dòrok language. All of the written script you may have been seeing in concept art thus far have been real Dòrok words; They’re not random scribbles but a functional language. Ancient Dòrok is what modern Dòrok evolved from. An interesting bit of lore pertaining to modern Dòrok script is that it wasn’t recorded as a written language for a while; even after it had become the common spoken language. This was due to how in the old era of Dòrok, reading and writing was something only the upper class, and individuals tied to a church carried out. The rich and influential even opted to continue to keep their texts in ancient Dòrok to further the divide between commoner and noble. To put it into perspective, this is like if all books in Italy were written in Latin as opposed to Italian just to add another block to keep commoners from becoming literate. It wasn’t until the first Shussar, Yarojin, took power that modern Dòrok was put to a script. Shussar Yarojin wanted to bring literacy to the public, having been a peasant his whole life, he then reformed education to be made accessible to everyone.

Modern Dòrok was specifically designed to be intuitive and not complicated, it’s a sound based alphabet, so every word is always spelled exactly how it sounds. This makes modern Dòrok extremely easy to learn.

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Kitalupa and Nazusha’s sticker and keychain design.

A poll was run on the discord server asking about potential merch designs and what characters should be represented, every character in the poll received enough votes to each get at least 1 design. These are the designs for Kitalupa and Nazusha.

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Happy first ever fanart Friday! These lovely drawings of Anja and the Dòrok mini cow were done by @assman_buttbag on Instagram.

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Yerma. A well respected adventurer who specializes in making long and intensive voyages into the mutated biomes. Yerma used to go on voyages alongside his wife, who unfortunately passed away due to a cancer caused by an accident during one of their voyages. Yerma continues to make voyages even in her absence, as it was both of their dreams to uncover relics and secrets from the world pre-extinction. Since then, Yerma has become a pioneer, in discovering new artifacts, one of his most notable being one he named after his late wife.

Yerma continues to look forward always, and in his grief he met Anja, the protagonist. Yerma serves as a surrogate father figure towards Anja. The two of them are very close, and Anja considers Yerma her closest living relative. The pair met when Anja was much younger. Anja was looking to get into artifact hunting due to her infatuation with pre-extinction technology. At that point, Yerma was still leading voyages into the mutated biomes and took her under his wing as a new recruit. Over the months of working with each other, Yerma saw a lot of himself in Anja. Anja’s longing to understand what the world used to be, and where her place was in the world were feelings Yerma understood all too well. Before long, Anja was Yerma’s confidant and right hand. Even now, as Anja lives on her own, following her own path, she visits and writes to Yerma frequently. She always comes to him for support.

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An adventurer's guide to the pollution from the mutated biomes.

The pollution is the toxic byproduct that the AAM

(Advanced Accelerated Mycobacteria) releases after successfully eating and processing dangerous contaminants in the soil, air and water following the mass extinction event. The pollution is directly proportional to the AAM's presence, the more contaminants, the harder the AAM works, the higher the density of the pollution. While the pollution is dangerous and can be lethal in high doses, it is a much more beneficial way of dispersing the contaminants as the pollution quickly dissipates when released. Instead of lingering for hundreds or even thousands of years, the pollution disappears when the AAM dies or has no harmful contaminants to consume.

Due to how the AAM is engineered as a modified version of a tuberculosis bacteria, the pollution's effects are similar to the effects of the tuberculosis disease.

Victims of pollution poisoning may not experience all symptoms, but will exhibit at least 2. Symptom severity and the quantity largely depend on the overall health of the victim. You may also experience symptoms from previous levels along with symptoms of the current level. Exposure symptoms are more or less the same for all life forms with tissue lungs.Though, size does matter, as larger animals can withstand more and smaller animals less. *It is also important to understand that since the pollution impacts not just the air, but also water and soil. Drinking polluted water, growing crops. or even raising food animals in soil that has a pollution presence can cause adverse health effects. People who live in close proximity to the mutated biomes often have to worry about these symptoms and effects.*

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For those of you who did not know, this world does not have normal and typical animals. When the mass extinction event happened, the group that preserved humanity (known only as the progenitors), also engineered lifeforms to stabilize the ecosystem after the fall of the world. Many of these engineered lifeforms were based on middle to upper epochs of the Cenozoic era. This is due to the fact that following the apocalypse it was predicted to set climate back to a more archaic state. With increased global temperatures, rising sea levels, and about 2 times the carbon emissions in the atmosphere, it was only logical to base creatures off of prehistoric animals that lived in these conditions. (People were modified as well, but that’s not relevant right now.)

The animal you see in front of you, is an engineered animal based on megalostragus, the giant goat from the Pliocene epoch. These animals live transiently from the Dòrok steppes and mountains, and they have been domesticated and are the primary ground mount that people use within Dòrok. You may have noticed that they have 2 sets of nostrils, and this is because many animals have advanced respiratory systems to deal with lingering toxins that may be present in the air. These second sets of nostrils, lead to a separate sinus cavity with tiny hairs that become inflamed when certain toxins interact with them, alerting the animal to potentially dangerous breathing conditions.

This one is a quicker drawing. I usually mess around with concepts and sketches to help put together a cohesive look and feel for cultures. Eventually I would like to do short drawing exercises where I pick an occupation, a region in Dòrok, and a name and then just put together a large assortment of different sketches.

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The mutated biomes. Arguably one of the most important aspects of this world. Highly toxic, mutated land caused by an artificially engineered strain of the tuberculosis bacteria. This bacteria eats pollutants and hazardous contaminants in the soil, air and water. This bacteria is known as the AAM (Advanced Accelerated Mycobacteria), and it is the basis of all life in the mutated biomes. It excretes a poisonous gas as a byproduct of consuming pollutants. This poisonous byproduct sustains the mutated flora and fauna who reside in the biomes and creates an abundance of different ecosystems depending on pollutant density. The ecosystem depicted here is the least deadly type of biome within the mutated biomes, lurid grasslands.

This specific location of the mutated biomes used to be the captial city of a fallen empire called Tal-Ēsi. The once great and prosperous empire met a violent end following a civil conflict that Balkanized the entire region; now all that's left of the capital, is the seedbed for the spreading mutated biomes.

The third image in red, is a thumbnail sketch concept of the most dangerous mutated biome type, the bleeding mires. The toxic fumes are so dense due to high pollutant levels, that the landscape is a large, incredibly dense and lush mutated forest. This attracts a lot of herbivores and thus also, a lot of predators.

The final images are a map of the habitable zone, the stretch of the world in which humans can survive, as well as the complete biome list and mutated biomes growth map. ADF is the measure of time in this world, and it essentially means years after the extinction event. So, for example, 900 ADF means 900 years after the extinction.

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Anja post. Everyone's favorite girl plot. l included the rough sketches of her plane, breakdown of what she has on under the armor, (She is wearing a flight safe suit.) And other stuff for funsies ;)

I want to talk a little bit about her armor, because the concept of armored pilots seems a little counter intuitive, doesn't it? But in this world, aircraft are fine resources, so it's not often that they're shot down.

Instead, crews opt to hijack larger air vessels. This situation reintroduces armor, as firearms are not used in the cockpits (lest you want to risk damaging the controls) making melee combat mandatory which then warrants armored protection. Anja used to be an air pirate, so she's no stranger to air battles and has a lot of combat expertise.

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It's time to talk about the Kedatar Padoru, or the KP for short. One of my personal favorite concepts from this project. The KP are elite soldiers, who work extremely closely to the Shussar (monarch) of Dòrok, they serve as a secret police force, as well as a security and intelligence organization. in real life they could be compared to that of the Russian Oprichniki or the KGB; fictional comparisons would be to that of the Dai Li from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

It's important to note that while Dòrok is not fully authoritarian, they do have a tendency to lean more authoritarian due to their isolationist policy. Their core goal is to protect their country and their people so that the other nations don't find out about the revolutionary technology they possess (their life saving biotechnology could be used as a tool to destroy nations if it falls into the wrong hands.) This causes Dòrok to have much more rigid and authoritarian doctrines when it comes to the flow of information and what gets in and out of Dòrok. The KP aren't usually coming for people who criticize the government but people looking to expose Dòrok’s secrets. Things like black market networks of Dòrok’s tech are *heavily* cracked down on; data breaches are the KP's number one adversary.

The second and third images is the 3D sculpt I made of the KP, I love working in Zbrush and their design was too much fun to not sculpt. The final image was their initial polished sketch, as you can see minor changes were made during finalization. Though, having the crescents of the helmet change to delineate rank is a concept I quite like, and will probably keep.

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Dòrok military concepts. I want to talk about these a little bit, because it's key to understand that while individuals can wear armor, and have more fantasy centered appearances, this is a futuristic setting. Most nations don't have access to technology before the extinction event that caused the world to be the way it is.

The caveat of Dòrok as a nation is that they're forced to be isolationist, because they *do* have access to sophisticated technology. If others knew, they would be conquered by virtue of being a threat to global powers and their technological progress would be erased; hence, isolationism. (They also keep a very low profile on the world stage.) So, with that said, you will absolutely see technological dissonance between Dòrok and the other nations, sometimes even within wealth classes in Dòrok. This concept is already present as oftentimes military regiments tied to the Shussar (monarch) of Dòrok tend to have more sophisticated equipment than the people's regiments. This isn't to say that Dòrok is the super powered laser terminator culture, because they have resourcing issues that prevents them from fully industrializing into a technostate. They may be able to manufacture extremely sophisticated things like their biomechanical soldiers (Saber, Mace, Axe) and amphibious hover vehicles (council warship), but they simply do not have the resources to mass produce those items and have very few of them available.

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Dòrok people concepts. The person in the first image is the same person in the second image, albeit he is older. His name was Majichime, and he used to be a significant character in the comic’s plot. Majichime still exists, though his name will change due to the Dòrok language seeing changes. (His design will most certainly be overhauled as well) Majichime’s role in the story is also significantly reduced, as the protagonist of the comic changed, changing which characters receive spotlight.

These sketches are a good measure of showing the general look and feel of Dòrok people, Dòrok is incredibly diverse, and has a myriad of different ethnic groups endemic to Dòrok. As for cultural inspirations, they’re a healthy cross section of various Eastern European, Eurasian, Central Asian, and Southeast Asian cultures. Despite having these inspirations it’s pertinent that Dòrok maintains its own identity, inspirations may be present, but above all Dòrok is Dòrok. Also they're the hat people. This is true. Wearing hats is legitimately culturally relevant to them.

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Concepts for other cultures outside of Dòrok. Pretty behind on these, because there are about 9 nations total in the habitable zone. (the place where the comic takes place and the stretch of suitable land for human settlement.) Dòrok is the sole focus for obvious reasons, as it is the primary setting in the comic so it takes priority.

However, a lot of worldbuilding is already done for the other nations, so a lot of the written components are completed, it's just a matter of actually making the artwork. The first fellow, the rendered portrait, is from the same nation that the main character of the comic, Anja, is from; in fact he's the leading lord's eldest son.

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Slightly out of date concept art for the environment of Dorok. In the first image the city is supposed to be the capital of Dorok, and that may be subject to a redesign. These images are still worth showing and sharing because the fundamental concepts are still there and accurate. Small elements may be subject to change as worldbuilding is finalized and previous designs fall out of relevancy and the cultural concept of Dorok becomes much more succinct.

The core concept of Dorok will always be a fairly harsh terrain, with plentiful mountains and steppe; one of the few places in the habitable zone that regularly sees snow, and it's landscape is littered with ruins from an era long gone.

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Hello and welcome to The Dòrok Project! An ongoing worldbuilding and comic project set in a sci-fi fantasy setting, with post apocalypse undertones.

This is a joint project created by concept artist, Tatiana and her dear friend the linguist, Jasper. “Together we seek to produce visually interesting and functional concept art in a unique world setting, with heavy emphasis on speculative biology and worldbuidling coupled with functional fantasy langauges.”

These are work in progress sketches of the main cast of the comic, starting from left to right with:

Anja (protagonist): Anja is a fiery pilot and engineer, with a sorted pirating past who’s earnestly trying to move past it all and be a better person. Anja left her home country to live in the nation of Dòrok so she could better pursue her dreams of working with advanced technology. She is enamored with all things technology from the pre-extinction world.

Nazusha (Deuteragonist): Nazusha is the current monarch of the nation of Dòrok, he is in his mid to late twenties and is a pragmatist as well as very cunning. Nazusha received the throne at age 14 after the untimely demise of his father, Yarojin, this has left Nazusha with a cynical disposition, lingering bitterness over his stolen childhood and resentment towards the throne.

Kitalupa: Nazusha’s little brother. Where Nazusha is a pragmatist and cunning, Kitalupa is Compassionate, scholarly and a diplomat. Kitalupa has an endless font of empathy, sometimes to a fault. At times Kitalupa can be reckless and emotionally volatile, he possesses potent psychic abilities that can exacerbate that volatility. Nazusha is oftentimes overprotective of him, which has caused Kitalupa to become a touch naive and sheltered.

Jeropoka: A cousin of Yarojin (Nazusha and Kitalupa’s father) Jeropoka is the pope figure of Dòrok, and after Yarojin’s demise, has become a pseudo parent figure to Nazusha and Kitalupa. Like Kitalupa, Jeropoka is also a psychic, he is arguably the most powerful psychic in Dòrok. While Jeropoka is stern and commanding, he does care deeply for Kitalupa and Nazusha, thinking of them as his own sons. Jeropoka shares more rigid beliefs about how Dòrok should be run, though his own goals and motives are usually unclear.

Links:

https://www.instagram.com/the.dorok.project_official?igsh=MXZtbHFmNXMzcGF1aw%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

Additional information:

Media callouts for individuals looking to get a vibe check of the project itself:

Would like to shout out a tertiary inspiration being Monstergarden on YouTube, and Planet Exoton on Instagram, we’ve been big fans of those projects and it helped us find the confidence to make our own.

* While his project is authored by two individuals, we have had a lot of help from volunteers over the development cycle.

* Please reach out of you would like to be a volunteer!

* Fun Fact: This project initially started as a fan project, but spiraled out of control and became its own thing.