FANTASY WITH DIRT UNDER ITS FINGERNAILS

Kings and beggars. Dwarfs and dark elves. Cult leaders making questionable arrangements with demons. A ghost standing guard over something best left alone. Somewhere underground, a battle has already started.

Brad McDevitt Stock Art – Fantasy Collection 8 contains 25 TIFF image files covering 24 distinct subjects, aimed at publishers who want fantasy art with a bit more character than another procession of clean-faced heroes standing heroically beside their equipment.

There are warriors here, certainly, but also rulers, criminals, social scenes, monsters, supernatural figures and incidents already in progress. It is the sort of assortment that can furnish an adventure or setting book properly: people to talk to, things to fight, places where something awful happened, and a few people who may belong in more than one category.

WHAT YOU GET

The supplied files are:

• Banshee

• Barbarian Shaman

• Barbarian Woman Warrior

• Barbarian Thug

• Beggar

• Blood Cult Leader

• Cavern Battle

• Counsel

• Crime Lord

• Dark Elf Lovers

• Dark Elf Warrior

• Demonic Pact

• Duct-Tape Samurai

• Dwarven Matriarch

• Dwarven Ranger

• Elven Royalty

• Elven Geisha

• Execution Hill

• Fantasy Swordswoman – greyscale

• Fantasy Swordswoman – colour/Version 2

• Feral Cyclops

• Feral Faerie

• Fish Demon

• Ghostly Guardian

• Giant Encounter

The Fantasy Swordswoman accounts for the discrepancy between 25 files and 24 subjects. The two files are alternate treatments of the same piece.

The names above are cleaned versions of the supplied filenames. They are useful descriptions, not mandatory setting canon. Rename them, recast them and make them earn their keep.

THE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY LIVE IN THE WORLD

Fantasy art has a bad habit of depicting everybody at the exact moment they are about to kill something.

The Beggar, Counsel, Crime Lord, Dwarven Matriarch and Elven Royalty are useful because they give you people with other jobs.

The Beggar can sit in a street scene, provide information, witness a crime or turn out to be someone considerably more important than appearances suggest. A fantasy city feels rather more convincing when everyone who lives there is not a seventh-level mercenary.

The Crime Lord has obvious uses in thieves’ guilds, smuggling networks, corrupt cities and underworld factions. He might be the villain, the person who knows who the villain is, or the only man capable of getting the characters through the docks without attracting the attention of seventeen different authorities.

Counsel gives you something rarer still: people talking.

Use it for court intrigue, political advice, whispered conspiracy or the moment somebody persuades a ruler to make a disastrous decision. A setting can contain all the monsters it likes; eventually somebody still has to sit down and decide whether invading the neighbouring kingdom is affordable.

The Dwarven Matriarch and Elven Royalty broaden things further. They give you authority figures, patrons and political characters rather than reducing fantasy peoples to soldiers with different ears.

BARBARIANS, PLURAL

There are three barbarian pieces:

Barbarian Shaman

Barbarian Woman Warrior

Barbarian Thug

That already gives you more of a society than one bare-chested fellow glaring beside an axe.

The shaman can be a healer, spirit-worker, elder, ritual specialist or mediator between the tribe and whatever supernatural arrangements keep the winters survivable.

The woman warrior might be a champion, raider, bodyguard, mercenary or clan leader.

The thug is your heavy: guard, bandit, bruiser, pit-fighter or man selected to communicate policy after discussion has failed.

They can belong to one culture or three entirely different ones. Nothing requires the usual lazy divide between “civilised” kingdoms and generic savages. Give them politics, families, trade, grudges and all the other things supposedly sophisticated people use to make killing one another complicated.

DWARFS AWAY FROM THE MINE

The Dwarven Matriarch and Dwarven Ranger are a useful pair precisely because neither is the standard dwarf-with-hammer.

The matriarch could head a clan, merchant house, guild, noble family or sprawling collection of relatives whose inheritance disputes require geological maps.

The ranger takes dwarfs out into the wild. Scout, border guard, hunter, pathfinder, explorer—the figure suits mountain passes, woodland fringes, deep roads and expeditions beyond the comfortable reach of forge and fortress.

Together they suggest a culture instead of an archetype.

Perhaps the ranger serves the matriarch. Perhaps they are related. Perhaps the ranger has been sent to recover a runaway heir, stolen clan treasure or somebody whose marriage is required to prevent three generations of blood feud.

There is an adventure in there before anybody rolls for initiative.

ELVES WITH PERSONAL LIVES

The collection includes Elven Royalty, Dark Elf Warrior, Dark Elf Lovers and the piece originally filed as Elven Geisha.

The Dark Elf Warrior is easy to place in underground kingdoms, mercenary companies, noble houses or armies. Soldier, assassin, exile or champion all work.

Dark Elf Lovers is more unusual. Fantasy stock art seldom allows characters to do much besides fight, pose or cast spells. Here you have a relationship: romantic, illicit, political, tragic or otherwise.

That can illustrate a marriage, forbidden affair, factional alliance or two characters who genuinely care for each other despite belonging to the villainous faction. Antagonists having personal lives does wonders for preventing them from feeling like furniture with hit points.

The file titled Elven Geisha uses Japanese-inspired fantasy imagery rather than documenting a historical role. There is no reason to retain that label in your setting. The figure could be a court entertainer, artist, diplomat, companion, noblewoman or member of an invented fantasy culture.

The artwork provides the starting point.

You get to do the world-building.

BLOOD, DEMONS AND SMALL PRINT

The Blood Cult Leader and Demonic Pact supply some properly dark fantasy.

A Blood Cult Leader can preside over sacrificial rites, outlawed religion, decadent nobility or a perfectly respectable organisation whose cellar accounts deserve closer inspection.

The figure works better if the cult has something to offer. Power, healing, protection, fertility, revenge—people rarely join sinister organisations because somebody showed them the robe and they liked the cut.

Demonic Pact shows the more transactional end of the supernatural.

Somebody wants something.

Something else has agreed to provide it.

The remaining problem is the price.

That gives you more to play with than simply having a demon attack. A bargain creates obligations, loopholes, debts and consequences. The original signatory might already be dead. Their descendants may have inherited the terms. The demon may be behaving impeccably according to an agreement everybody else misunderstood.

Never sign anything from the Lower Planes without having a solicitor look over it.

Preferably a different solicitor from the demon's.

THE DEAD HAVE CLAIMED THE HILL

Execution Hill, Ghostly Guardian and Banshee make a natural little knot of supernatural history.

Execution Hill might have been used for public hangings, military punishments, sacrifices or the dispatch of political inconveniences. Whatever happened there, plenty of resentment has had time to accumulate.

The Ghostly Guardian can defend a tomb, shrine, boundary, family or treasure. It might be serving willingly. It might be trapped. It might be guarding everybody else from the thing on the other side.

The Banshee can remain an omen of death, become an ancestral spirit or take a more active role in proceedings. Her appearance may warn of a killing which can still be prevented—or simply announce that someone, somewhere, has already run out of luck.

Put all three into one adventure and the outline writes itself rather quickly.

People executed on the hill are returning. The guardian refuses to allow anyone into the old burial ground. The banshee has begun crying outside the ruler's chambers.

Somebody in the government already knows why.

THINGS WITH TOO MANY TEETH

The collection provides a nicely mismatched handful of creatures:

• Feral Cyclops

• Feral Faerie

• Fish Demon

• Giant Encounter

The Feral Cyclops can be a wilderness brute, degenerate survivor, escaped slave, primitive giant or creature pushed out of a deeper territory by something worse.

The Feral Faerie belongs to fantasy that remembers folklore was frequently vicious. Fairies can steal people, sour milk, curse families, lure travellers off paths and become offended by etiquette nobody knew they were expected to observe.

Tiny wings and cheerful sparkles are very much optional.

The Fish Demon can inhabit coastal ruins, drowned temples, swamps, river settlements or the hold of a vessel everybody insists arrived empty.

Whether it is literally demonic is up to you. It could be an aquatic species, transformed human, summoned creature or simply something frightened fishermen named after the worst thing they could think of.

Giant Encounter provides an actual confrontation rather than another bestiary portrait. That gives a page scale: small people, very large problem.

With giants, terrain suddenly becomes ammunition.

DOWN IN THE CAVERNS

Cavern Battle gives you another complete action scene.

It can carry a dungeon encounter, underground war, desperate retreat or chapter dealing with subterranean adventure.

Caves are awkward places to fight. Bad light, narrow passages, unstable ground and no convenient route around whatever large creature has decided to occupy the tunnel.

A scene such as this is handy in layout because it breaks up rows of isolated portraits. The reader gets a glimpse of the game actually happening.

Something has gone wrong.

People are responding badly.

Excellent.

THE DUCT-TAPE SAMURAI

And then there is Duct-Tape Samurai.

Some images demand solemn analysis.

This one is called Duct-Tape Samurai.

It is obviously more playful and anachronistic than the rest of the pack, making it useful for comic fantasy, modern fantasy, improvised armour, post-apocalyptic material or worlds where somebody has reconstructed the idea of a samurai using enthusiasm, rubbish and whatever was left in the shed.

You could make the character an eccentric warrior, scavenger, fantasy cosplayer or accidental visitor from somewhere much less magical.

The piece gives you permission to be silly for a page.

Fantasy can survive it.

TWO VERSIONS OF THE SWORDSWOMAN

The Fantasy Swordswoman is supplied in two treatments:

• Greyscale

• Colour/Version 2

These represent one subject, not two different illustrations.

The figure can become a duellist, adventurer, mercenary, guard captain, player character or whatever other armed professional your manuscript happens to require.

Having two treatments lets you choose whichever works better with the surrounding design. The greyscale version may sit more naturally in a monochrome interior; the colour treatment can take a more prominent role in digital or colour publication.

It is an actual useful variation rather than a reason to pretend the pack contains one more subject than it does.

THE COLLECTION IN PRACTICE

Fantasy Collection 8 has an unusually good spread for setting material.

There are rulers and advisers.

There are criminals and ordinary people.

There are fantasy cultures represented outside combat.

There are monsters, ghosts and demons.

There are full scenes for battle, execution and supernatural dealings.

That means the art can move through different kinds of chapter without the book becoming twenty consecutive portraits of armed strangers.

It suits:

• Fantasy role-playing games

• Dark fantasy

• Gothic fantasy

• Dungeon adventures

• Setting books

• Bestiaries

• Court and political intrigue

• Cult and occult material

• Independent fantasy fiction and ’zines

The whole folder can be used in one broad project, but there is no need to force it.

A dwarf book can take the matriarch and ranger. A dark-fantasy adventure can use the cult leader, demonic pact and execution hill. The monsters can wait for a bestiary.

Stock art earns its money repeatedly.

That is rather the point.

EXACT FILE COUNT

The collection contains:

• 25 TIFF files

• 24 distinct subjects

• Fantasy Swordswoman: greyscale and colour/Version 2 treatments

• 23 further subjects supplied as individual TIFF illustrations

• No PNG files shown

• No other repeated subjects apparent in the contact sheet

Filename extensions vary between .tif and .TIF, but all visible files are TIFF images.

Some pieces may also occur in other Brad McDevitt stock-art collections where they fit more than one genre.

LICENCE

The artwork is supplied for personal and professional projects under the terms of the attached licence.

Read that licence before publishing and check its requirements regarding attribution, modification and redistribution. The sensible rule remains simple: use the artwork as licensed material inside your work; do not start selling the raw files as though nobody will notice.

More characters, monsters, scenery and strange people making bargains can be found in the wider Brad McDevitt Stock Art range.

The demon has the contract.

The dead have the hill.

The giant has noticed the party.

At least you've got pictures.