Bryan H. Rombough

(Had a couple commissions drop out at the last minute hit me up if you’re looking for art!)

Leader of the Pack (Chris Achilleos cover art for White Dwarf 78, April 1986; originally appeared in 1985 as the cover of The Hounds of Skaith by Leigh Brackett; later used as card #77 in the Chris Achilleos Fantasy Art Trading Cards set)

TTRPG Cover

Bio Plate protects from many hazards, but may attract unwanted attention from certain xenomorphs (Nick Smith, Challenge magazine 46, GDW, 1990). The artist notes:

Chisut Susit ant farmer making his rounds collecting eggs and larvae. On the rainy face of the Cynozepali mountain range, domestic caviar ants are farmed on elaborate terrace networks that must be engineered to prevent flooding of the colonies, and to sustain other agricultural ventures in between the ant nests.

Terrace ant farms (and most domestic ant farms in general) are partly hollow readymade structures built for a colony to establish itself in, with these ones specifically being made with brick and clay and built into the side of a terrace wall, with sealable/removable chambers made with hollowed out tubes of bamboo. For smaller scale day to day harvests, these chambers are minimally disturbed by using a narrow crook to selectively scoop eggs and larvae into a basket. The terrace space between the nests is sometimes managed to grow the plants favored by the ants (who harvest them to grow the fungus they feed on) in some setups, though in others the space is utilized for wheat or other qilik-focused crops while ant-fungus food is brought to the domestic colonies from external sources.

Caviar ants and qilik have an ancient, partly co-evolutionary partnership, with active ant farming being likely the oldest settled agricultural practice in this world, and the ants have accompanied qilik almost everywhere they dispersed throughout the tropics and subtropics (though not to the temperate and polar southern extent of the qilik range of settlement, where the ants can't survive the winter). The eggs and larvae provide the staple protein for a significant majority of agrarian qilik societies. Chisut Susit mythology holds that early people stole their staple grain of wheat from Heaven but only learned how to grow it by watching the ant livestock of an agricultural deity collect, plant, tend, and harvest the grain, much like mundane ants collect certain leaves and grasses for their fungus and tend to their crop to feed themselves. The ants have these associations with wheat specifically by way of them having very little interest in collecting it for fungus food, if properly managed. This allows for ant and wheat agriculture to occur in immediate proximity, with the ants even assisting in weeding via marked preference for leafed, weedy plant species over grasses, though such dual management is an extremely complex practice and requires substantial labor and alertness to the conditions of each colony.

These ants produce colonies with potentially dozens of queens apiece and show reduced hostility towards ants of other colonies, allowing for massive egg production in concentrated settings provided that the colonies have sufficient resources for comfort. Their queens and drones are flightless and propagation requires the intervention of handlers, and feral colonies usually cannot harvest enough plant material for their own fungus agriculture needed to sustain the sheer amount of ants that hatch without anyone to harvest their eggs, but a successfully established feral colony can cause small scale ecological devastation before it collapses.

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Qilik are adapted to using both their mouths and hands as manipulating limbs. Most tasks requiring forward-facing flexibility above the shoulder level are much better accomplished with the mouth, which has no teeth in the front and reduced/probably vestigial dentition in the back, as well as a lobed, muscular tongue that can provide an effective and fairly dexterous grip when used in tandem with the jaws.