TREASURE, TROGLODYTES AND A BOOK BOUND IN HUMAN SKIN

A sensible adventurer sees a chest surrounded by tentacles and concludes that somebody else can have it.

A player character sees exactly the same thing and starts asking about armour class.

Brad McDevitt Stock Art – Fantasy Collection 5 contains 16 image files covering 13 distinct pieces of Brad McDevitt artwork, with monsters, magical loot, decorative material and several characters who seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere between sword-and-sorcery and an especially peculiar fairy tale.

There is a troglodyte. A four-armed demon. A giant spider. A pixie who appears to have acquired dwarven ancestry somewhere along the line. There is also an armed mouse, a ghostly rabbit and a grimoire bound in human skin, because apparently vellum was not sufficiently sinister.

The pack is useful for adventures, bestiaries, treasure sections, campaign settings, fantasy fiction and those awkward gaps in a layout where another generic warrior simply will not do.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY INCLUDED

The collection contains:

• Human-Skin Grimoire – greyscale

• Troglodyte – colour

• Troglodyte – greyscale

• Pagan Goddess Statue

• Giant Spider

• Fantasy Banner – colour

• Fantasy Banner – greyscale

• Female Comic Wizard

• Four-Armed Demon

• Insane Hippie – greyscale

• Insane Hippie – colour

• Dwarven Pixie

• Mouse Knight

• Ghostly Rabbit

• Tentacle and Treasure

• Assorted Magical Treasure

That comes to 16 image files representing 13 distinct illustrations.

The three repeated subjects are:

• Troglodyte

• Fantasy Banner

• Insane Hippie

Each has an alternate treatment. Everything else is a separate piece.

The download contains 12 TIFF files and 4 PNG files.

THE HUMAN-SKIN GRIMOIRE

Some magical books are ancient repositories of wisdom.

Some are made from people.

The Human-Skin Grimoire comes in greyscale and does most of the work for you before a single line of accompanying text has been written.

It can be:

• A necromancer's spellbook

• A forbidden religious text

• Evidence recovered from a cult

• A prison for a spirit

• The diary of somebody with extremely poor stationery ethics

• A fake made to frighten people

• A genuine artefact everyone desperately hopes is fake

The important thing is that it looks like an object with history.

Put it on a treasure page and the reader starts wondering what is inside.

Put it in an investigation and the question becomes who made it.

Put it in the hands of a player character and you can start wondering why they have not put it down yet.

A good magical object should provoke greed and caution at the same time.

Preferably greed wins.

That is where adventures come from.

TROGLODYTE, TWICE

The Troglodyte is supplied in colour and greyscale versions.

One creature, two treatments.

Use whichever sits best with the project.

The figure can go straight into an old-school bestiary as a subterranean humanoid, but nothing says you have to keep the name. It could become a cave-dweller, degenerate underground people, amphibious monster, mutant or inhabitant of some forgotten city beneath the hills.

Troglodytes are particularly useful because they imply more than an encounter.

If one lives in the cavern, there are probably more.

If there are more, they need somewhere to live.

If they have somewhere to live, they have territory, food, customs and things they would rather adventurers did not steal.

The dungeon has just acquired inhabitants instead of targets.

THE FOUR-ARMED DEMON

The Four-Armed Demon has at least twice the normal number of opportunities to ruin somebody's afternoon.

It can serve as an infernal guardian, summoned creature, temple idol made flesh or something from a cosmology where bilateral symmetry was regarded as an unnecessary restriction.

Four arms also give the writer options.

Weapons.

Spellcasting.

Grappling.

Ritual gestures.

Carrying the remains of whoever arrived first.

It could be a unique demon or one member of a species. It might guard the Pagan Goddess Statue, emerge when somebody opens the grimoire or be the previous owner of the treasure everyone has just pocketed.

Whatever you call it, there is enough going on visually to justify giving it more than three hit dice and a corridor.

THE GIANT SPIDER

No fantasy art library is complete without something capable of turning a cellar into a death trap simply by being larger than expected.

The Giant Spider suits caves, forests, ruined temples, abandoned towers and anywhere else an adventurer can walk into a web and immediately begin regretting their armour choice.

It can be an animal, magical beast, familiar, temple guardian or one of several creatures infesting an area.

The nice thing about spiders is that their presence leaves evidence.

Webs.

Wrapped prey.

Egg sacs.

Tracks.

A very large hole in the local goat population.

You can build tension before the creature appears.

Players will still walk into the obvious nest.

Years of evidence suggest this is inevitable.

TENTACLES AND TREASURE

Tentacle and Treasure understands fantasy adventurers perfectly.

Show them danger.

Put valuables immediately behind it.

Watch basic survival instincts collapse.

The image can illustrate a trapped hoard, aquatic monster, dungeon hazard or magical treasure being guarded by something whose anatomy was designed principally to reach around shields.

It also works nicely as a chapter opener for treasure, dungeon hazards or things that live in treasure chambers because adventurers keep bringing food to them.

There is an entire philosophy of dungeon design contained in the image:

If you want adventurers to approach something dangerous, put gold beside it.

ASSORTED MAGICAL TREASURE

The Assorted Magical Treasure piece is useful for precisely the pages that fantasy books invariably contain and artists rarely become excited about illustrating.

Magic items.

Loot.

Relics.

Objects the Games Master knows will immediately be divided according to which player can make the most unreasonable argument.

Use it beside treasure tables, magical-item rules, hoards, relics or the possessions recovered from somebody who was clearly much more successful than the current party until quite recently.

A collection of objects also avoids forcing one specific item upon the text. The illustration can sit beside several entries and let the reader decide what belongs to what.

It is practical stock art.

Which sounds boring until you reach layout and discover there is a six-inch hole beside the treasure chapter.

THE PAGAN GODDESS STATUE

The Pagan Goddess Statue can be treasure, religious art, magical focus or the centre of an argument which has been going on for several thousand years.

Who made it?

Who worshipped it?

Who stole it?

Who presently owns it?

Are any of those people still alive?

Does the goddess care?

The statue might be entirely mundane and valuable because of age or artistry. It might also be the sort of object that makes priests nervous and dogs refuse to enter the room.

That ambiguity is useful.

A cursed statue and an innocent statue surrounded by frightened superstition can produce equally good adventures.

The players will assume the curse first.

This is usually because Games Masters have trained them badly.

A WIZARD WITH A SENSE OF HUMOUR

The Female Comic Wizard brings a different tone from the grimoires and demons.

She can be a player character, eccentric mage, comic NPC or simply somebody whose approach to magic is less solemn than the traditional old man glaring over a staff.

Fantasy benefits from occasional visual relief.

Not every magician has to stand beneath thunderclouds while announcing forbidden syllables.

Some of them have apprentices.

Some have cats.

Some have experiments currently stuck to the ceiling.

Some have been asked by the local baron to explain why the tower is smoking again.

A lighter character portrait can help a book breathe between the monsters and bodily remains.

THE DWARVEN PIXIE

Dwarven Pixie is one of those combinations nobody necessarily asked for and somebody was absolutely right to draw anyway.

A sturdy little winged character can be a fairy smith, subterranean fey, woodland craftsman, player race, magical familiar or unique NPC.

Perhaps dwarven pixies live around mineral springs.

Perhaps they pollinate gemstones.

Perhaps they make armour for ordinary pixies and have become furious that nobody appreciates the engineering involved.

The art gives you enough of a hook to invent something.

That is often more useful than another technically competent elf standing in an empty rectangle.

THE MOUSE KNIGHT

Small hero.

Proper weapon.

Probably extremely serious about the whole business.

The Mouse Knight is ready for fairy-tale fantasy, animal adventures, children's material, comic fantasy or settings in which intelligence and courage have little regard for scale.

It might be:

• A knight errant

• Guardian of a burrow kingdom

• Familiar granted human-like intelligence

• Tiny champion serving a larger court

• Somebody currently facing an opponent several hundred times his own mass

An armed mouse can be charming without becoming uselessly cute.

Give him a quest.

Give him a rival.

Give him a warhorse approximately the size of a nervous pigeon.

The rest follows naturally.

THE GHOSTLY RABBIT

The Ghostly Rabbit raises questions.

That is enough.

Was it murdered?

Is it an omen?

Does it lead travellers somewhere?

Is it the familiar of a dead witch?

Does it haunt the vegetable garden?

The piece works for comic fantasy, fairy tales, supernatural wilderness encounters or a genuinely eerie scene where something harmless has become wrong in a way nobody can quite explain.

A ghostly warrior is expected.

A ghostly rabbit gets attention.

Use that.

THE INSANE HIPPIE

The Insane Hippie appears in both greyscale and colour.

The original filename is obviously a caricature rather than a diagnosis that needs to survive into your publication.

The figure can be reworked as a wild-eyed mystic, prophet, hermit, alchemist, cultist, psychedelic wizard or visitor from another world who has seen considerably too much of the universe and responded with enthusiasm.

The image may work especially well in gonzo fantasy, weird fantasy, time-travel material or settings where reality has started leaking around the edges.

He could know the truth.

He could be talking complete rubbish.

Those possibilities overlap more often than scholars like to admit.

FANTASY BANNER

The Fantasy Banner comes in colour and greyscale.

This is decorative material rather than a character or monster.

Which means it solves a completely different publishing problem.

Use it for:

• Chapter headings

• Section breaks

• Sidebars

• Page furniture

• Handouts

• Decorative framing

A recurring element helps unrelated pieces of stock art look as though they belong in the same book.

It gives the interior some visual identity.

Nobody gets excited about page furniture until there is no page furniture.

Then suddenly everyone becomes an expert.

A PARTICULARLY ODD LITTLE TOOLBOX

Fantasy Collection 5 is not enormous.

That is not what makes it useful.

Its thirteen subjects cover very different jobs.

There are monsters for a bestiary.

Treasure for loot chapters.

An artefact.

Characters.

Humour.

Decorative material.

A scene with tentacles where sensible people would have used a locked chest.

A short adventure could raid half the collection without feeling repetitive:

The party is hired to recover a Pagan Goddess Statue.

A human-skin book identifies where it was taken.

The route passes through troglodyte caverns.

A four-armed demon guards the shrine.

The treasure chamber is occupied by tentacles.

The mouse knight claims legal ownership of everything.

Frankly, the mouse has the strongest case.

The other pieces can sit in the art folder waiting for another project.

They do not go stale.

THE NUMBERS

The collection contains:

16 image files

representing

13 distinct illustrations.

The file-format breakdown is:

• 12 TIFF files

• 4 PNG files

Alternate treatments are supplied for:

• Troglodyte: colour and greyscale

• Fantasy Banner: colour and greyscale

• Insane Hippie: greyscale and colour

The remaining ten subjects are single illustrations:

• Human-Skin Grimoire

• Pagan Goddess Statue

• Giant Spider

• Female Comic Wizard

• Four-Armed Demon

• Dwarven Pixie

• Mouse Knight

• Ghostly Rabbit

• Tentacle and Treasure

• Assorted Magical Treasure

LICENCE

The artwork may be used in personal and professional projects, subject to the terms of the licence included with the collection.

Read those terms before publication, especially the provisions governing credit, alteration and redistribution.

Some illustrations may also appear in other Brad McDevitt collections when a piece suits more than one genre.

You can find more monsters, adventurers, magical objects and publishing problems already solved in the wider Brad McDevitt Stock Art range.

The spider is enormous.

The grimoire is definitely human skin.

The treasure has tentacles.

The mouse still wants to know what your problem is.