Now I await the Silmarilion,

Recent art from our Blades campaign:

The great magician Phaedra had her origins as a sooty teen maid in Sublunary House, then better known as the Temple of Persephone of the Gates. She is here pictured bent over her project: a diorama representing part of the Antechamber, the infinite labyrinth that souls wander after death.

Some three hundred years later, the great magician Phaedra--now a ghost herself, though not a very well-traveled one--pokes @catchaspark's PC Aphra in the arm. Rude, much?

It's Arc 3 of our Blades game and @catchaspark's Aphra Chesky recently became a god! Well...... recently found out she was a god. The other one depends on your definition of "recently."

Good thing she has a friend around to give her the low-down-- or in this case, the high-up, courtesy of long-term frenemy Leo "Royal" Tomanek, once a cracksman, addict, and repeat offender; now the two-faced lord of many ways.

Once upon a time...

A loyal prince, a visionary opera singer, an uninvited architect, an ambivalent prisoner, and a godly queen set out to fulfill their king's one wish: to destroy death and create paradise on earth. Through the power of their song, they armed him to enter the labyrinthine underworld and conquer it for his own.

There was just one problem. When they finished their performance, the king didn't (wouldn't?) come out.

And what did they do next? That would be telling.

~*~

A behemoth illustration for our Blades in the Dark campaign, depicting five tragic backstory NPCs turned... rogues' gallery of present-day arc antagonists. Detail shots under the cut:

Some years later... another art dump for our Blades in the Dark campaign (see inspo blog @gatecrashed for more context)... because I got COVID (FOUR YEAR STREAK BROKEN) and had soup for brains except as concerned ridiculous lineart. From left to right and top to bottom: 1) Our first major backstory/historical NPC, Barnabas Lowrie, a sexy clown pirate magician born on the day the sun broke (or, you know, around there. close to that date. PR is everything in the pirate line).

2) A truly wretched family dinner ft @catchaspark's PC Aphra Chesky; redeemed* arc 1 antagonist Perceval Rowan; immortal naysayer Cormac Winter; and his granddaughter, Phoebe, attempting to transcend this mortal plane the more traditional way.

3) An in-universe photograph of Malcolm Strangford, fearless leader of the Whaler's Rebellion against the Immortal Empire, bleeding out in a greenhouse at 7:03 PM. He is survived accompanied by his aide, Jonathan MacRae.

4) An NPC whose name we don't know inspects the detached leg of a member of the automaton hivemind Cerberus.

Three views of @scribblingface’s character Calida interacting with NPCs from the most recent arc of @ourlightsinvain‘s Blades in the Dark campaign (made in, among other things, heartfelt gratitude to her for both getting me into watercolors/inaugurating my collection of physical ATCs with her own lovely paintings). 

Fairly early on in @ourlightsinvain​‘s Blades in the Dark campaign, @scribblingface​‘s PC Calida went to visit a fortune-teller named Anatolia the Diviner--not about the future, but about the past. She heard tell of two predecessors’ visits: one from Perceval Rowan, a concert pianist and music magician curious about the use of his ancestral property to host the opera that supposedly ended the world; and one from Alienor Crenher, a then-doctoral candidate reluctantly investigating her own Cataclysmic inheritance.