Zalekios Gromar

A few years ago, my friend Jeremy--thusfar the only person I've met aside from myself who is willing to GM--started running a game for me. The game focuses around my masochistic, self-mutilating, chaotic evil vasharan, and his quest to kill the gods. If you're not familiar with the vasharan race, then shame on you. The Book of Vile Darkness was superb, even if it did pull too many punches. But I'm getting off track.

Zalekios is a level nine gestalt Warlock (7) / Rogue (7) / Hexblade (4), and ever since I first penned his vile backstory, my favorite character. And in my recent drawing craze, I decided it was about time to make a really concerted effort to create an image of the character.

From the physical description portion of his character sheet:

Age: 28
Gender: Male
Height: 6'1
Weight: 170lb
Skin: Pale White
Hair: Zalekios' Black hair has been pulled back in a tight topknot. The topknot is dyed red.
Eyes: A piercing green - seemingly out of place with the rest of his appearance.
Face: The skin from just below the nose, to just above the chin has been neatly cut away, exposing the entire jaw. Zalekios' teeth have been sharpened to a point. The right ear has been completely removed, and the left ear has 9 metal bars stuck through it. 3 metal spikes have been embedded in the place of each eyebrow. The nose has been removed on one side, and the missing piece was replaced by wire to keep the rest of the nose in place.
Clothing: Zalekios wears a thin, black, leather, trench coat with a hood, usually open in the front. under it, he wears a loose fitting scarlet shirt with a deep V-neck, and matching pants. (Think: red dobok) The leather coat is held tightly at the waist by a red silk sash, from which hang his whip and kukri. On his shoulders Zalekios wears simple metal shoulder pads, spattered with his own blood. These pads are attached to the coat.On his wrist and hands, Zalekios wears a set of spiked gauntlets. Most of Zalekios' equipment is stored in a small black duffel bag which is slung over his shoulder, and attached to his shoulder pads by a quick release switch.

So without further preamble, my attempt:



Some readers might recognize this from a bit of official Wizards of the Coast art of Warlocks:



What can I say? I didn't trace it, but I certainly leaned heavily on it as a guideline. I think it really helped me understand feet a little better, and gave me a really great way to deal with 'holding a ball of fire / energy' without making it look stupid.

Non-art post to follow in a few days.

I need to make up my mind!

So here's the deal.

I've decided that I utterly fail at writing without a topic. I come up with some interesting stuff, but invariably, one of two things happens: either I gravitate towards a topic (such as 90% of my posts being WoW related on the original Wearing Black in the Back) or I never post (Such as the most recent incarnation of Wearing Black in the Back.)

On the other hand, when I have a topic, a'la Curse of Senility, I seem more than capable of maintaining a regular writing schedule. The only reason that blog is suffering so much is because most of my good ideas for posts get funneled into Blood Pact instead, since I get paid for writing that. (For the record, for the 1 or 2 people reading, Curse of Senility isn't dead, there's a good reason for the lack of writing. If it does permanently die I'll make a note of it over there, but I plan to return to once-weekly posting there soon.)

So the question arises: What kind of topic should I have for my blog? It needs to be something I'm passionate about. Something I have a lot of things to say about. The obvious winner in this regard--at least at this point in time--is dungeons and dragons. I haven't been able to STOP thinking about it in the last few weeks. Given a minute amount of polish, a lot of private writing I've done lately could easily be made blog-worthy.

So, as of now, Wearing Black in the Back is dedicated to my Tabletop Gaming. And I'll see how that goes. Curse of Senility will continue to be about World of Warcraft, and I will continue to (attempt) to publish there once a week. Something I will get much more strict with myself about once my academic situation settles down a tad.

How Do You Get a Philosophy Major off of your Porch will feature all the random crap that I posted on Wearing Black in the Back prior to this change. I'll post there if I'm ever bored about writing on D&D and WoW.

Here's to this change being a better fit for me than the last one was.

Art Tiem!

Over the last couple of weeks, I decided to start up a Dungeons and Dragons game for a few of my friends who had never played before. Now, as a DM, I'm the kind of guy who puts more writing and forethought into games than he probably should. I've got stacks of handwritten notes and fully detailed character sheets for a dozen or more NPCs that I plan to make important to the campaign. That's partially why I haven't been writing here or at CoS as much as I'd like. There are other reasons, though the sum total of all of them still don't leave me feeling very happy about my lack of activity. Still, some of my players read my blogs, so posting what I write for the D&D games would ruin the story! Though I *may* start posting highlights of our games.

For today though, I have shitty pictures that I drew.

See, one of my players provided me a drawing of her character along with her character sheet, and I thought that was pretty cool. So I decided to sit down and see if I couldn't draw up some of the more interesting NPCs that I've created for the game. I started with two of my favorites, and the total drawing time between them only amounted to 3 hours of procrastination on my Ethics paper!


This is 'X':


X is a bit of an enigmatic character in the campaign, and is intended to be. He's a member of another adventuring party that exists in the world my characters are playing in--one which my party recently saved from being sacrificed to Vecna--neutral evil god of secrets and magic. Even his companions don't know all that much about him, and my players know even less. All they really know is that he's covering his face for some reason, and that reason is compelling enough that he made use of the "Quick Draw" feat, and rolled for initiative when one of my party members attempted to have a peek underneath.

This drawing took about half as long as the other one, and actually came out a bit better than I expected. The character's left hand is easily my favorite part of the whole drawing. I, like many others who doodle in their spare time, have a bitch of a time drawing hands. This one, however, looks almost decent.

Most of the rest of the image, I'm alright with. It certainly looks far more like a rogue from World of Warcraft than I'd like. Particularly the way my 'half robe' ended up looking like a Tabard, and the way that the bit covering his head looks like the Tier 2 rogue headpiece. Not to mention the size of those shoulders. But all in all, it turned out okay.

One more thing of note is the feet. They're atrociously drawn, but I've never been very good at feet. This particular pose was a new thing for me, and I liked the way it looked in the end.

Next is Erin:



Erin is the leader of the adventuring group that X is part of. She's a Wizard who suffered a rather horrible childhood injury when she was 2 years old. (A vampire who was terrorizing her town cut a gash through her head with a dagger while her parents cowered in fear.) But she's actually got a rather cheery outlook on life, and her personality was very much based off of Kaylee, from Firefly. In fact she even introduced my players to 'cheeseburgers.'

This picture is the very first drawing of a woman that I've ever been even moderately pleased with. I swear to god, boobies are way too fucking hard to draw. Female anatomy sucks. >.>

This isn't really what the character is supposed to look like. Over her depicted outfit she wears a white robe, open in the front, as well as white gloves. But after wrestling for a couple hours just to get this looking right, I thought it would be better to end with a moderately decent product, rather than add a bunch more details and perhaps ruin what small measure of success I managed to pull out of this.

I could have done a much better job of coloring this, but truth be told it was never really my intent to color it. I just didn't think it was possible to figure out precisely what she was wearing without color, so I tossed it on there.


EDIT: This is Kisteer Forktongue, Kobold Rogue:



Just kind of a quick doodle I did while I was taking a break from a paper. But I think it turned out quite well considering my relative inexperience. I borrowed a lot from my girlfriend Stephanie's art style.

I have no delusions about my talents. I'm a writer--and barely that. By no stretch of the imagination do I have any skill with visual art. But it's fun to doodle sometimes, and I thought posting this would be better than leaving my previous post up any longer.