FANTASY NEEDS FARMERS TOO

Fantasy worlds cannot consist entirely of adventurers.

Somebody grows the turnips. Somebody remembers what happened in the old mill. Somebody sits in the corner of the inn smoking a pipe and knowing rather too much about the road through the woods.

Then an anti-paladin rides into town and ruins everybody's week.

Brad McDevitt Stock Art – Fantasy Collection 7 contains 16 distinct TIFF illustrations, ranging from ordinary medieval faces to monsters, occult scenes, decorative artwork and the sort of villains who generally acquire ominous theme music.

It is a smaller, tighter collection than some of the other Brad McDevitt packs, with a particularly useful emphasis on people who can actually populate a fantasy settlement. Alongside them are a kraken, an animal demon, sacrifice, skulls and two anti-paladin pieces for when village gossip finally gives way to something that needs stabbing.

CONTENTS

The collection contains:

• Kindly Old Farmer

• Village Idiot

• Village Wise Woman

• Weasel with Pipe

• Medieval Woman Headshot

• Tough Guy with Beard

• Anti-Paladin Triumphant

• Skulls

• Kraken

• Art and Robotics

• Fantasy Trade Dress – PWWW

• Candlelit Message

• African Man

• Animal Demon

• Animal Sacrifice

• Anti-Paladin

All 16 files are TIFF images, and the official listing presents them as sixteen separate pieces rather than alternate versions of the same handful of pictures.

The titles above follow the supplied names. They are labels for the artwork, not orders from the artist about what the character must be in your setting.

That matters particularly with older stock-art filenames such as Village Idiot. The picture can become an eccentric villager, fool, beggar, witness, harmless local character, drunken prophet or whatever else suits the material. There is no reason to import a dated label into the finished book merely because it survived in the filename.

PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED

The Kindly Old Farmer, Village Wise Woman, Medieval Woman Headshot, Tough Guy with Beard and the character filed as Village Idiot are some of the most practically useful pieces here.

None requires a grand entrance.

They are the supporting cast.

The farmer may own the field where something keeps killing livestock. He may remember the ruined chapel before it was ruined. He may simply be an amiable old man who gives the adventurers directions and consequently becomes the one NPC they would burn the kingdom down to protect.

The Village Wise Woman might be a healer, midwife, herbalist, keeper of local traditions or the person everybody quietly visits after dark while publicly insisting that they have no truck with witchcraft.

Give her genuine magic, folk knowledge, superstition or some tangled combination of all three.

The Medieval Woman Headshot is deliberately broad. Merchant, villager, servant, noble attendant, innkeeper, witness—the image can take whichever identity your project needs.

Then there is the Tough Guy with Beard, useful wherever negotiations require the visual suggestion that failure will have physical consequences.

A tavern needs someone who throws people out.

A noble needs a bodyguard.

A criminal needs an enforcer.

A Games Master needs somebody to stand beside a door and make the players immediately curious about what is behind it.

This is the unglamorous work stock art does extremely well.

WEASEL WITH PIPE

There is a piece called Weasel with Pipe.

That is already most of the sales pitch.

An anthropomorphic weasel smoking a pipe can be a rogue, merchant, familiar, scholar, criminal, gentleman adventurer or woodland eccentric whose politeness should not be mistaken for honesty.

He suits traditional fantasy, talking-animal settings, fairy-tale material and anything with a slightly grubby storybook quality.

There is something especially useful about a character this specific and this open-ended. A generic swordsman fills a space. A pipe-smoking weasel starts suggesting dialogue before he has even been given a name.

He knows a shortcut.

The shortcut costs three silver.

He neglected to mention the trolls because you did not specifically ask about trolls.

Perfect.

THE ANTI-PALADIN PROBLEM

There are two separate pieces of anti-paladin artwork:

Anti-Paladin

and

Anti-Paladin Triumphant

These are not duplicate treatments of one image. They are two distinct illustrations.

The first can introduce the character, class, order or villain. The second provides a more dramatic scene: the same broad archetype in victory.

That makes the pair useful together.

An anti-paladin might be a fallen knight, infernal champion, blackguard, corrupted holy warrior or perfectly sincere servant of a religion whose ethics happen to be dreadful.

He may command undead troops, serve a demon, lead an occupying army or simply be the sort of adversary who believes virtue is a weakness that ought to be punished out of people.

The triumphant image can sit later in an adventure, on a faction page, or beside the depressing consequences of allowing such a character to win.

Two illustrations of the same broad archetype also let a publisher maintain some visual continuity without simply repeating a single picture.

That is useful in a villain section, especially when the villain is supposed to matter.

KRAKEN

The Kraken needs little assistance.

Put it in the sea.

Add ship.

Regret ship.

It can serve naval fantasy, coastal adventure, bestiaries, maritime horror or the inevitable chapter explaining why merchants pay extortionate rates for insurance.

The creature might be a singular legendary monster, one member of a species or the divine pet of something worshipped beneath the waves.

Perhaps sailors leave offerings.

Perhaps the local ruler has made an arrangement with it.

Perhaps the characters are on the first vessel whose captain thought the arrangement sounded unreasonable.

A kraken is useful because it changes the scale of an adventure immediately. Fighting individual pirates is one sort of problem. Having the ocean itself sprout tentacles is another.

THE ANIMAL DEMON

The Animal Demon is more ambiguous, which is often better.

The filename tells us the broad category without pinning down an elaborate cosmology.

It could be a beast possessed by something infernal, a demon in animal form, a monstrous familiar, a nature spirit gone rotten or simply a creature whose appearance led frightened villagers to call it demonic.

That leaves room for several kinds of fantasy.

In a religious setting it might be an actual infernal servant.

In folk horror it could be a local spirit demanding old rites.

In sword-and-sorcery it may simply be something ugly, hungry and inexplicably resistant to ordinary weapons.

Let the artwork provide the face.

You decide what happens when somebody hits it with silver.

ANIMAL SACRIFICE

Animal Sacrifice gives you a ritual scene with none of the setting assumptions nailed down.

That could mean:

a forbidden cult;

a perfectly accepted religious ceremony;

a desperate attempt to placate a supernatural being;

folk magic;

dark sorcery;

or somebody performing an entirely ineffective rite because they have misunderstood an old book.

The last possibility is often overlooked. Fantasy religions and magical traditions become much more interesting when not every belief is automatically correct merely because magic exists.

Perhaps the sacrifice does nothing.

Perhaps it works, but not for the reason anyone thinks.

Perhaps the villagers have performed it every winter for three hundred years because the one year they did not is still referred to only as that winter.

An image like this is useful in adventures because it gives the Games Master something happening, rather than another person standing still with equipment.

SKULLS

Sometimes you need a picture of skulls.

Fantasy publishing is refreshingly uncomplicated about this.

The Skulls piece can sit beside necromancy, death magic, burial customs, battlefields, dungeon dressing, cult material or a particularly grim chapter heading.

It can be evidence.

It can be decoration.

It can be an emblem.

It can simply break up a wall of text and remind the reader that the next six pages concern activities with an unusually high mortality rate.

Not every illustration requires a biography and plot hook.

Some things are allowed to be skulls.

CANDLELIT MESSAGE

Candlelit Message belongs to the quieter side of fantasy adventure.

Letters cause wars.

Messages betray conspiracies.

Orders arrive too late.

Somebody recognises the handwriting.

A sealed note may be more dangerous to a kingdom than another ogre wandering about in the woods.

This piece can accompany intercepted correspondence, coded messages, secret orders, confessions, invitations or whatever piece of paper causes the characters to abandon their sensible plans and leave immediately for somewhere dangerous.

It also makes useful chapter art for intrigue, investigation and lore.

Fantasy games occasionally remember that people communicate.

When they do, trouble becomes much more efficiently organised.

THE AFRICAN MAN

One portrait is filed simply as African Man.

The filename gives no specific culture, period, profession or social role, and there is no reason to invent one from a thumbnail.

Use him according to the setting you actually have.

He might be a merchant, warrior, traveller, diplomat, sailor, scholar, craftsman, nobleman, priest or player character.

A broad portrait is often more useful than one tied to an elaborate archetype. It can be placed wherever the manuscript needs another face without forcing the surrounding material to conform to an invented backstory.

If you are using the image for a particular real-world-inspired culture, supply that cultural specificity through your own research rather than pretending the filename has already done it.

ART AND ROBOTICS

Then there is Art and Robotics.

It is an odd title for a fantasy pack, and there is no value in pretending otherwise.

That oddness can be useful.

The piece might fit magitech, clockwork fantasy, ancient constructs, magical automata or a setting where artifice has advanced rather further than the local pseudo-medieval architecture might suggest.

It could also be used outside fantasy entirely. Stock art frequently crosses genre boundaries, and the publisher explicitly notes that some illustrations appear in more than one collection where the subject matter fits.

That is not duplication within this pack; it simply means an image may also have found a home elsewhere.

A fantasy book containing strange machinery, magical constructs or forgotten technology may find this one particularly handy.

If not, keep it for another project.

Stock art does not expire.

FANTASY TRADE DRESS – PWWW

The file titled Fantasy Trade Dress – PWWW appears to be decorative material rather than a conventional character or monster illustration.

That gives it a different job.

Use decorative art for headings, page furniture, separators, chapter titles or other layout elements where a full illustration would be excessive.

Good page decoration is surprisingly valuable. It helps a book feel like a designed object rather than a manuscript that happened to acquire pictures.

A recurring trade-dress element can tie together pages containing otherwise unrelated art.

Nobody buys a fantasy book because of a decorative divider.

They certainly notice when the book has none.

SIXTEEN PIECES CAN GO A LONG WAY

The small size of this collection is offset by its spread.

There are villagers and supporting characters.

There are villains.

There are monsters.

There are ritual scenes.

There are atmospheric and decorative pieces.

That means the collection can do more than fill a bestiary.

A village adventure could use the Farmer, Wise Woman, Village Idiot, Medieval Woman and Tough Guy before the supernatural plot even becomes visible.

The Candlelit Message introduces the problem.

Animal Sacrifice reveals what somebody has been trying to prevent.

The Animal Demon arrives.

The Anti-Paladin turns out to be behind it.

The Kraken is completely unrelated and waits patiently for the next supplement.

That is how an art library ought to work.

FOR SMALL PUBLISHERS

Bespoke commissions are best saved for the things that really must look exactly right: covers, signature characters, unique monsters and setting-specific locations.

Stock art does the everyday labour.

The farmer does not need a £150 commission.

The skulls do not need three rounds of revisions.

The pipe-smoking weasel probably deserves them, but restraint remains important.

Fantasy Collection 7 can supply:

• NPC portraits

• Villagers and supporting cast

• Villains

• Monsters

• Ritual scenes

• Adventure illustrations

• Decorative layout material

• Atmospheric chapter art

For a short adventure, that may cover a substantial portion of the visual needs.

For a larger book, it fills the spaces between major bespoke pieces.

For a publisher producing several smaller releases, the images can sit in an art library until the right manuscript comes along.

Much better than leaving another rectangle marked ILLUSTRATION TK and hoping layout somehow solves it.

EXACT FILE BREAKDOWN

The collection contains:

16 TIFF image files

representing

16 distinct illustrations.

There are no alternate colour or greyscale treatments listed as additional files within this particular collection.

The three ordinary Tough Guy/Villager-style portraits are separate images, as are the two Anti-Paladin pieces.

Some of the artwork may also appear in other Brad McDevitt collections where the subject fits several genres.

LICENCE

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

Read that licence before publishing, particularly its requirements concerning credit, alteration and redistribution.

The sensible principle remains simple enough: incorporate the licensed art into your finished work. Do not simply redistribute the raw files and discover a sudden enthusiasm for arguments about technicalities.

More monsters, characters, scenery and people with much larger weapons than the farmer can be found in the wider Brad McDevitt Stock Art range.

The farmer has seen something in the field.

The wise woman knows what it is.

The anti-paladin is probably responsible.

For once, the weasel is keeping quiet.