Showing posts with label orienters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label orienters. Show all posts

Stablehand: Orienter, Portensilisk, Cragwing, Wanyanszar

This post was supposed to post some time ago but I never got the Arbiter's design done so it just sat around instead until I had the good sense to take the Arbiter out and put it in a new post.


The Orienter (Synthesis + Desolation) is a kind of living compass, with eight floating arms that each "point" to one of the Directed attributes. It has a great directional sense, and will gladly give directions to whoever wants them, drawing from what seems to be an uncannily great knowledge of the layout of the universe. Despite this, though, it tends to wander around a single, fixed area giving off an odd sense it has no idea where it should be going.

Below their arms they appear to have a strange double armillary sphere. For them, it functions somewhat like an elaborate compass, and interestingly, some human Navigators have mastered the art of using similar spherical compasses to plot their courses.

(New development I didn't tell you about: Nassak and Portent Rider both lean toward the Navigator archetype, a new archetype I just added. Nassak probably doesn't use one of those, but PR has one.)

The Portensilisk is a frightful creature that seems to be able to conjure up dark and terrifying hallucinations just by showing people its eyes. It also has a very limited ability to make such things actually happen, but not to a much greater degree than typical cirque techniques. For instance, it can conjure up small, corrosive waves of darkness-fluid around itself temporarily in a very limited radius, or bend the landscape around it temporarily to make a large structure easier to knock over.

Portensilisks tend to be peaceful and withdrawn most of the time, a lot like ordinary snakes, but unlike ordinary snakes, at times they will seemingly just randomly decide to be destructive. The good news, though, is that they will just as capriciously decide to stop being destructive.

(This is hardly even a concept picture of the Portensilisk, I'll do a real one later)

Cragwings (Fantasy + H-Clarity) are literally just huge chunks of cliff rock with... wings and a tail. That's it. That's all they are. They fly around randomly in the air and seem to thrive in deserted places with a lack of coherent logic, like cloud islands with floating mountains (i.e.: not normal places). They also sort of have a theme song.

Wanyanszars (H-Incongruity) are fluid, springy, vaguely lizard-like beings that appear to be made of some kind of unusually violent and bright energy that tears through their surroundings. They thrive in ambiguous environments, which, apparently, they have the power to warp to their liking, as if certain types of environments inherently had loopholes (e.g.: environment appears to be a lake at night, Wanyanszar jumps onto it and reveals it's actually a tar pit in front of a blue hazy screen; sees sidewalk drawing and jumps onto it, turns fake illusion into actual hundred-foot-tall tower). If one thing's for sure, they definitely don't mind chaos at all, though they don't necessarily delight in inflicting confusion on others. They're just at home in a chaotic environment.

The rounded Wanyanszar would be called a Jianjianszar if/when I use it, but I don't even have any idea what that one would be like yet so... no cool description on that one. Sorry. :p

(The Wanyanszar was from my initial concept drawings before mystery beings were entirely a thing; I forgot to really give it background and a name and integrate it so now I'm finally doing that. I realised it was a lot like a creature named Wanyanxi ("zigzag lizard") I'd made for a parody of Chinese Pokémon bootlegs, so for its name I just took Wanyanxi and mashed it up with -szara, the ending equivalent to "-er/-or" in MB language. It's basically a crazy bootleg name that literally means "Zigzagger" but I'm using to mean "Contorter".)

Stablehand: Infiltrator, Obtruder concepts, and... Xzhyrxiel alive, another expansion?

Hoo boy, another mess. Let's start with the Infiltrator.

Yesterday River Monsters reminded me that skates existed, so I looked them up and I was just like whoa look at these things they're so crazy. They almost look like an MB already, haha.

So, I thought, why not turn them into one? And I started designing this skate/ray MB that can flatten and extend its body seemingly endlessly in order to eavesdrop on everyone and everything (yeah, somehow its skin can just kinda hear I guess. MBs are weird :p).

A little later, I was thinking about how with the Nebuliser and Observer and Eventuator and Seuwayote and shoǔshi there were a bunch of cats and dogs already, so the Infiltrator might be adding a bit of needed diversity. And I thought about Commander, this creature I'd come up with really recently that was just going to be a really exotic big cat basically. (Commander is an individual, not a species by the way, just so you don't get confused. :p)

Then I got the stupid but neat idea to turn Commander into a big cat with skate-mantle-wings that looked like the Infiltrator's body on top. It was a really weird idea but on the other hand, oddly awesome. By the way, the word "skate" kept making me think of ice skates so I added some vague ice-skate-like shapes to Commander's design and I think it actually looks kinda cool that way.

Also on this page are my early concepts for the Obtruder (I drew the Machination parody first and turned it into a creature second), a flaredrakeicorn doodle, and early attempts to figure out how the heck to design a creature called the Orienter (it's supposed to look like a compass but with eight floating arms pointing to attributes instead of directions).

On a sidenote, the Orienter and Infiltrator both are a type of MB I wasn't intending to design originally. Believe it or not, I've expanded out my MB table AGAIN, separating the more "purposeful" creatures (whose names end in -er or -or) from the creatures based on attribute symbols and random things like the lightray eel I just tossed in there.

Part of this is because I was just wary of all my MBs looking like regular animals rather than weird abstract things like the Insulator and Adumbrator, a problem that was pretty widespread in the creatures in the second table. The other part was that there wasn't really a place for the Orienter or another thing tentatively called the Incenser (which I haven't drawn yet) in the table if I didn't do this. So, I feel like it was necessary.

Finally the thing in the upper left-hand corner is my first doodle of a character called Sonata. She's not for Stablehand, but rather an odd little side story idea called "Song of the Refugees".

(archive.org's edit page is doing weird things today, so the images I put there aren't showing up right now, sorry. They're just crops that show each thing a little cleaner though, so you're not really missing anything.) Ah, finally.