Art Thread: Menagerie RPG

The timeline is complex but for your purposes, this is accurate enough. :slight_smile: The armor came after Pneuma, but before Pneuma’s most recent shell, where she can pass for human.

And it looks fantastic :smiley:

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I feel honored to be character(s)-adjacent to the lovely, complex history of the Newmans. Happy to be the Enkidu character(s) to the myths of the post-Singularity.

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Jason: Summer! Hi there–
Alycia: how about you Enki-don’t

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Sometimes I think I go a little too ambitious with some of these illustrations. But I’m still going to give it a go.

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It is certainly coming along.

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With the lineart and flats done, that means we’re gotten past the easy part and into the rough part: shading. I also need to remember not to go too overboard on details, since the end result is about the same size as what it’s showing up on the forum’s preview (which is about 1/4 the size I’m working at).

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Looking for some help with a name.

The first set of decks (Charade, Concord, Ghost Girl, Mercury, and Radiance) are going to have the set name “Menagerie of the Multiverse” (a play on the Sentinels of the Multiverse name) as seen in the card backs I’ve posted previously. I’ve been pondering a name for the “expansion” that includes Jason Quill and the Newmen decks. My first instinct is a play on the “X-Men: First Class” name, since Jason and the Newmen were all founding members of the Menagerie, but I’m not sure what that might be. I’m hesitant to use the “Menagerie: Secret Origins” name after using it for a fictional comic series, but it could be fitting.

Thoughts?

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Menagerie: Tech Support

The remaining characters all have a technology theme and all played supporting roles in the updated cast’s lives.

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I think I can work with that.

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So now that everyone has some sample copies of the cards, of course I needed to redo the artwork on one of Ghost Girl’s cards. (Don’t worry. I promise, I have no desire to go back and change more.)

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This is the original. It’s not bad, but it’s also not good. It was a rush when I was getting to finishing all of Ghost Girl’s images and I was rather uninspired while making it. It’s functional.

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The update. Better draftsmanship, a little better posing, and that glyph makes sense in context. All good improvements. But the best improvement is when it is referenced later, it’s much more obvious.

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:thinking:

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Another day, another card.


With this one, however, I was interested seeing how folks make those videos where they record themselves and then speed up the artwork so it’s only a couple minutes. It’s been forever since I did any video editing (and it was never very much) so here’s an attempt at that in case anyone was curious in how the sausage was made.

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Very tasty sausage. Thanks, that was a lot of fun.

Also, fwiw, I get almost as much enjoyment from the little dialog snippets on each card as I do from the artwork. Both are a joy.

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Thanks! The dialogue snippets are sometimes the most fun and the most frustrating to work with on the cards. Fun because it gives me a lot of opportunities to add personality here and there. Frustrating because you can effectively only fit about half a tweet into those boxes and still have them legible.

I will also always take suggestions and/or corrections for anyone who doesn’t sound quite right. I try to envision the character’s voices when putting the quotes together (or just outright using clips from the session recordings) but I’ve only got my own perspective when it comes to the characters of the Menagerie-verse.

Coming up next, something that I don’t think I’ve shared yet: environment cards.

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You’ve been doing great

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So, environment cards.

In Sentinels of the Multiverse, environment cards define where the villain fight takes place. It can anywhere as big as a whole city, as small as a chemical plant, and as weird as a trial of Earth by aliens, a movie studio, or a post-apocalyptic future. It’s superheroes, you’ve got to go weird sometimes.

Now, you might have noticed that some of Radiance’s cards seem to be at a basketball court. While trying to figure out a way to give more “screen time” for Ghostheart to fill out their deck, I decided that their second appearance in the comics would be going against the Menagerie while they are having a night out after graduation at a local basketball game. This led to the creation of the Lee Sports Center (continuing the trend of homages to comic creators that Gardner Academy started).

However, this would also require more than a single appearance in the comics to fill out a fifteen card environment deck. Which means…


Yep, the Irregulators also had a comic or two that involved the Sports Center. In this case, I imagine it was something involving the Grail Knights and having to contact a spirit of the dead for information. Really, I just wanted something really weird (because again, superheroes) and nothing says weird like "the sports center is haunted, but it’s by a deceased athlete who dispenses advice to teenagers (and is also an homage to the late Dwayne McDuffie of Milestone Media, Static Shock, and DCAU fame).

And since Dave brought up the dialog snippets, you’ll notice that the snippets of environment cards are in a completely different style from the others (not sure why, guess the creators needed a way to just write some blurb about landmarks without having to have a character expositing). I really amused myself with imaging Telekinetician holding back fanboying for a whole issue of comics to get the mission over with, only to finally breakdown once everything was safe. Probably could use some trimming (four lines is about the most that can fit there and stay fairly legible, you can sometimes swing five, but six should be right out) and I will accept any help anyone wishes to give on that front.

Some more ideas for Lee Sports Center: a Rook talent scout (to fulfill my desire to put a Rook employee in every environment deck), a mascot with a tee-shirt gun, passing basketballs, and a crowd who won’t take a hint (tentatively titled “Why are you people still here?!”)

Other environments I am working on: Oakland Cemetery (with some Sepiaverse weirdness in there too), Gardner Academy (have some silly ideas about school events and students), Downtown Halcyon (which will probably have a lot of emergencies, like the Christmas Kerfuffle with the Yule Boys), and AEGIS HQ (during a prison break, because of course a prison break, superheroes. Hannibal Lectric likely showing up here and maybe some others who aren’t making the cut into their own villain deck, but that’s not a lot of folks).

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I thought it was “Armiger,” not “Armger.” Mentioned in case I’m not wrong.

That said, cool stuff.

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Nope, those are my dumb typos. Thanks for the catch.

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Okay, now I’m questioning whether or not I did make a typo, because both my input file and the image I’m seeing on the forums says Armiger. I’m thinking this may just be a case of the text being too tight because of the “six lines is too many” problem I’d mentioned before.

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Confirmed. When clicked to blow up, the “I” is in there. When at the default representation here, the I is not visible.

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