Behold! the ...

Oh, never mind.

I'm proud to say that I finally have a finished one of these drawings. I'm quite happy with it, but perhaps more happy that I would consider it a final product, not something half-assed to come back to. It is full-assed.

Not depicted is my Bugbear, which I skipped over since I was not quite happy with it. Instead of a fierce feline scowl, I am rethinking the face to give it wide, frightening bug-eyes (you know - bugbear) as a new twist.

The offer still stands - link to this blog and you get a free drawing. Maybe now you'll listen.

By the way, thanks to Roger Raupp of Dragon Magazine legend who inspired me to regard monster (and adventure) artwork from a more naturalistic viewpoint. The stuff from the modern books is so flashy and glossy, which undoubtedly takes talent to make, but it doesn't really transport me into the scene. Roger transported me.

This minor D&D-related complaint reminds me of an e-mail conversation I had with Gio (of Toast Machine) a while back. He encouraged me to post it, so here it is at last:

"Wandering around the Web (as I am want to do), I stumbled across certain pages of the WotC site. For reasons which I am sure that you can intuit from your knowledge of my opinions, I have not previously visited said site. But strange things happen at 2:30 in the morning and, well, I found myself here:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/rg/20051018a.

I will not hide the fact that the original books [AD&D 1st ed.] had their share of soulless random tables (% chance to be struck insane, type of mental affliction, etc.) and needless attempts at quantification (affect of age category on character attributes, etc.), but WTF? Am I imagining those endless tables of carrying capacities? Does Skip Williams have nothing better to do with his life? Worse yet, back up a page and note the 87 (EIGHTY-SEVEN) articles devoted to similar subjects. My favorite, however, is "Going Metric (Part Three)." Now, I have no doubt that there is some good to be found in these articles and as soon as I stop laughing I will try to find it. Until then, thank you Skip - you have given me grist for my D&D-based comic which I am that much closer to drawing.

(Seriously, are the only screwballs playing this game anymore all mechanical engineers? Is their idea of fun optimizing the weight distribution on their pack horse? You know I like realism, but CAN YOU PEOPLE USE YOUR &*^@#%ing IMAGINATION?)"

Gio's response:
" It is a great article (a series of great articles, really) though, I feel they could flesh out some of the details. I suppose the only question I am left with, is this:
If I have a Tri-ped Magical Creature, with a strength of 32, (or 45.78 if you want to convert that to the metric...) and I need it to simultaneously haul my portable (though less than 10 ft (3 and some odd meters...)) ballista, wear the custom barding that I had to pay 7 bajillion golds for (as according to table 175B9-alpha: "Barding Costs for
Magical Creatures With Rediculous Fucking Strength Scores") and that weighs 348 krudonitons (a dwarvish metric unit of weight measurement, as was covered in Doug Turdwaddler's article: "Dwarvish metric units of weight measurements (part 3)) AND bear the weight of my 24th level Dwarvish wizard (because, you know, now any race can be any class at any level... because, you know, with this new frenzy for accuracy in the
numbers, you know, they totally observed all of those race/class restrictions. You know. For the sake of realistic Role Playing. To make it real.) who is wearing mystical Plate Armor (that only has a 1% chance for arcane spell failure, which makes it, pretty good. Now that wizards can wear armor and all. Why the hell not?)... so, can he carry all of this? Would it be considered a light load? Medium?

Oh man. This is infinite fun with inifinite options. Realism as it it facilitates game play vs. Realism as it hamstrings game play, watches it bleed to death, and then pees on it. I think that's the kind of realism debate we need to stay focused on here."

My inevitable facetious reply:
" Are you mocking the fine writing of Doug Turdwaddler? Plus, you've obviously overlooked volume 5 of the painstakingly compiled series on conversions between the metric scales of the demihuman races. Of course, one could make the conversion oneself if the entry on page 42 of Module Y3, "Land of the Quantity Surveyors," is coupled with Box 7-2 on page 95 of "The Dwarven Oresmelter Prestige Class Handbook," connecting the modern kilogram with the archaic (human) gold standard weight, the "aurit," which in turn matches the dwarven krudoniton on a 25:1 scale. But I would much rather pay the $99.95 to have a convenient set of tables tell me how to multiply by 2.2."

Does that count as an official first blog rant?