#t'rang

“But of coursssse!”

So as you may already know, recently I’ve been replaying a favourite game from my childhood, Wizardry 8. Having managed to get a whole lot farther than I ever did as a kid, I’m now faced with an irritating choice - there are two rival factions in the game, the Umpani and the T’rang. The best course of action is to secretly ally with both at the same time, giving yourself access to both of their areas, secrets, recruits, etc before eventually brokering a truce between them as you prepare to face the big bad. There’s only one problem with this - the Umpani are boring.

Tantris up there is a typical T’rang - their design in game is more slug-like than serpentine, but their depiction in the intro suggests ‘snake’ to me and besides, it’s more fun to draw. I tried to combine both aspects in there though. The T’rang as a galactic empire seem to exert power mainly through their network of spies - their ‘Watchersssss’ - and the previous game, as far as I know, suggests they have an egg-laying ‘queen’. They also have all their lines written to best enhance their ridiculous hissing, which the voice actors somehow manage to make even more jarring than it otherwise should be by absolutely not flowing into or out of the hissing at all. By comparison, the Umpani are rhino people (possibly with beaks? The noughties-era polygons leave much to the imagination) whose attitude and organisation seems (to me) very stereotypical US military macho and who require you to undergo a recruitment process before they let you gallavant around their HQ.