Friday, October 31, 2008

When Fantasy Art Meets Fantasy Roleplaying - Why Mialee Has So Many Pockets

(This was originally posted at WordPress before we moved to Blogger)

Hi Everyone!

As you know, my website, Fantasy Art and Portraits, is focussed on the fantasy art of computer games. So you can imagine that I often run into tons of great art… but “can’t” use it. Here’s a sample from the roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons, specifically their 3rd Edition Player's Handbook.

They've always had sample characters that you can play using their rules, but this wasn't emphasized as much until the radical re-design that was 3rd Edition. Starting with the 3rd Edition, every type of character and race had an "iconic" character that exemplified or stereotyped the race (dwarf? elf?) and "character class" or career (bard? wizard?).

Where character concept and rules met, sometimes awkwardly, was in the art. From time to time, they had to reflect certain quirks about the rules, such as wizards requiring assorted ingredients in order to cast their spells. So what to do if you're a wizard and you know a score of spells, and need maybe as much in spell ingredients -- different ingredients -- that were often used up each time you cast the spell, so you also needed several of them?

The answer... pockets.

Mialee and her many pockets (wonder where she keeps her index and spellbook?)

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