Tag: post apocalyptic

#29 Clara

| November 30, 2011 | 0 Comments

She hadn’t always been like this, this cruel and unforgiving.  At one point, she had actually been a kind an gentle soul.  She could have been a loving mother.  Could have, if the world had not become the blackest version of itself.  Could have, if she wished to be weak and at the mercy of the merciless.  But she was never a sheep.  And let’s face it, wolves do not raise sheep.

Which wasn’t to say that she didn’t have a crystal clear understanding of the wounds she was inflicting.  In the quiet secret hours of the night, she catalogued them meticulously, carving into her own heart her own version of the pain she knew her children would most likely carry with them throughout their days.  Hopefully those wounds will have served their purpose, honing their reaction time and survival skills, helping them to understand that if mercy was a choice, it couldn’t always be the right choice.  And sometimes the greatest mercy was in cruelty.

She called them her children and they called her mama, even the ones who had come to her old enough to know that they weren’t of her blood.  This day and this age details like that hardly mattered.  Times were beyond tough- times were do or die in very short order, and none of these young ones were beyond understanding it.  They had been born to it, and had found their way to her in one way or another, with or without her help.

She was making of them a tribe.  A group which stood a chance of surviving by their own hand, and not at the mercy of all the cruelly wanton souls which seemed to be roaming the earth in hordes.  She fought for them, tooth and nail, and taught them how to fight for themselves, and damned if the older ones, some who had come to her old enough to be well familiar with the way the weak could be used, knew just how lucky they were for the chance she was giving them.

Which didn’t make it any easier.  She watched them sleep, huddled in a great mass for warmth when the coals died down.  When the wounds she carved into her young ones were sharp enough, she took a knife, made a little cut upon her wrist and rubbed dark ash into it, so that she would not forget.  Even as she knew that the world she was trying to remember would be little more than a fanciful lace of words when she was dead and gone, she vowed that she would not forget.  It seemed important not to.  It seemed important to remember, most of all, that mercy was a choice.

#19 Florence Reine le Téméraire de San Marais

| November 20, 2010 | 0 Comments

Name: Florence Reine le Téméraire de San Marais
Species: Maraian (mutated human)
Age/Sex/Race: 364/Female/N/A
Main Goal: Turn San Marais into a thriving trading city to bring in plenty of men
Occupation: Monarch
Motivation: Love for her people and her city
Inner Need: To improve the lives of her people and her city
Flaw: Overly optimistic, too trusting, bold, a little reckless
Good/Bad Habits: Stays cooped up in her castle, preferring to rule through emissaries. Kind of lazy.
Secret: Frequently makes treaties with the kroi (pig-people also living in the swamp) to turn them against each other before betraying and enslaving them.
Skills, Knowledge, Props: Very good liar, a schrewd politician, has many connections both in and out of the city of San Marais
Quirks: Eschews formal garb in favor of more fashionable apparel. Had her throne replaced by a hammock.
Attitude: Lax, warm, friendly
Dialogue Style: Cordial, polite, a little coquettish
Backstory/Description: On the southern coast of the Bile Swamps there is the glimmering canal city of San Marais, inhabited by a race of long-lived tailed women. This city is ruled by a queen who is revered like a saint, of which there have been two. Being the third queen after her mother died about two-hundred years ago, Florence le Téméraire was young, energetic, and ambitious. Needing un-mutated human males as part of their unique semi-parthenogenic life cycle, Florence sought to turn her city into a trading empire to bring in more such specimens. During her rule she has sent out ambassadors and explorers to make deals to trade with foreign powers, mostly in the commerce of slaves. The savage kroi, monstrous pig-like humanoids who also live in the Bile Swamps, are routinely enslaved and exported to other lands in exchange for human males. Florence’s policies are mostly favored by her subjects, and she is widely approved by all but a few die-hard isolationists.

Yeah, this one’s a little different from the others since it’s entirely digital, made in GIMP. I usually draw the characters by hand, ink them, scan them, then color them in GIMP, but I think I like this technique better.

#18 Candlesleer

| November 20, 2010 | 0 Comments

Name: Candlesleer
Species: Giant Floating Head (severely mutated human)
Age/Sex/Race: 88/Male/N/A
Main Goal: Make his tribe survive
Occupation: Tribal chieftain of a tribe of floating heads
Motivation: Survival
Inner Need: Respect, success
Flaw: Reactionary, short tempered, blood thirsty
Good/Bad Habits: Leads by example, first to rise, first to rest. Sees all criticism or hesitation as a challenge to his authority.
Skills, Knowledge, Props: Very good memory, knows the migration patterns of animals, good strategist.
Quirks: Inexplicably has four constantly-burning candles growing out of his tentacle-eyeballs. Gets offended whenever somebody asks about them.
Attitude: Jovial
Dialogue Style: Verbose, often repeats whole sentences with slight variation between them. Very loud.
Backstory/Description: In the frozen tundra of the Sacred Lands live a race of floating head people, who call their land Sacred and declare it a sin to touch it, hence they levitate everywhere. Candlesleer was born into one of the several semi-nomadic tribes of floating heads, led by his father, their incompetant and forgetful chieftain. When Candlesleer was barely 25, the age of sexual maturity in his people, his father declared him the new chieftain. Though the other heads were skeptical, at first, Candlesleer won their respect by memorizing the migration patterns of animals and using that knowledge to help his people find food. His tribe has thrived ever since.

Alright, here’s another three from my post apocalyptic campaign. I like this setting; it’s easy to come up with characters for it. However, I’m more than ready to be done with this competition. This is starting to wear me out.

#17 Skyman

| November 17, 2010 | 0 Comments

Name: Skyman
Species: Darkraker (mutant human)
Age/Sex/Race: 14/Male/N/A
Main Goal: Steal some fine swag, buy/build/forcibly take a subterranean lair of some sort, take a few wives and have a few dozen children.
Occupation: None
Motivation: Greed, Lust
Inner Need: Loot and women
Flaw: Crude, uncivilized, ignorant, nearly unusable hands, kind of a coward
Good/Bad Habits: Steals a LOT
Secret: Tries not to broadcast the fact that he’ll gladly slit someone’s throat for fun and/or profit.
Skills, Knowledge, Props: Very stealthy, deadly claws instead of fingers or toes, great climber, can control light with his mind.
Attitude: Gruff, mean
Dialogue Style: Caveman talk (“Give money or I kill you!”)
Backstory/Description: Skyman was born into a nest of darkrakers and was given the name of Skyman for his latent ability to control light (like the sky, or whatever). However, he got sick and tired of their leader, Badjaw, pushing them around, so using his light control powers to shade his albino skin from the sun he set off on his own, looting and killing on a whim.

Here’s the third post-apocalyptic guy, also hired by Sargonovus to round out the power trio. Three is powerful number.

#16 Benjamin Arthur Fitzgerald, Private 1st Class

| November 17, 2010 | 0 Comments

Name: Benjamin Arthur Fitzgerald, Private 1st Class
Species: Charred (mutant human)
Age/Sex/Race: 1059/Male/N/A
Main Goal: To remember all of his past
Occupation: Mercenary/Bodyguard
Motivation: Unease at the huge gaps in his memory
Inner Need: Survival
Flaw: Can’t remember anything specific from more than 50-60 years ago. Sort of “out there,” like he was half asleep constantly.
Good/Bad Habits: Follows orders of his current employer/superior without question, comment, or complaint.
Skills, Knowledge, Props: Military training, swordplay, eats and drinks half as much as a normal human, immune to disease, poison, and radiation. Will live indefinitely.
Quirks: Gives his full military designation, Benjamin Arthur Fitzgerald, Private 1st Class, Serial Number 34-886-542, Columbian Army 14th Infantry Division, even though the Columbian Army and Columbia itself were both destroyed in the Backlash.
Attitude: Distant, Drowzy, Docile
Dialogue Style: Extremely terse, sometimes just in single words. Longer thoughts punctuated with “Sir!”
Backstory/Description: Benjamin Arthur Fitzgerald was a soldier in the Columbian Army deployed in Aryabrata during the war with the gods. When the gods ended the world in the Backlash, he was exposed to the raw light of creation, which seared off his flesh but also made him immortal. He has since wandered the lands of Aryabrata for 1000 years, selling his services as a mercenary or bodyguard for whatever they will pay, all the while steadily losing his long-term memory.

Here’s another guy from that same post-apocalyptic setting. I envisioned him as being hired by Sargonovus as a bodyguard.

#15 Sargonovus

| November 17, 2010 | 0 Comments

Name: Sargonovus
Species: Egghead (mutant human)
Age/Sex/Race: 29/Male/Caucasian
Main Goal: Build a vast empire through conquest.
Occupation: Pre-Backlash Weapons Expert
Motivation: Ambition
Inner Need: Power, Knowledge
Flaw: Arrogant, Selfish, Bossy
Good/Bad Habits: Maintains an old Glock very well. Always gives orders assuming they will be followed without question and gets offended when they are.
Secret: His secret plan to acquire the ultimate weapon, a slaymachine.
Skills, Knowledge, Props: Highly analytical, tactical mind. Extremely knowledgable in pre-Backlash weapons and history. Decent craftsman with metal.
Quirks: Always wears an old lab coat his father gave him.
Attitude: Smug
Dialogue Style: Accent kind of like the 20’s, uses lots of informal addresses (“pal, buddy, buster, slick”).
Backstory/Description: Sargonovus’s parents could barely stand each other, both being as arrogant as he was. After he was born, his father, Paracaesar, got into a fight with his mother and left her, taking Sargonovus with him. Under his father’s tutelage he learned all about scavenging and repairing pre-Backlash weapons, as well as their history gleaned from a few tattered textbooks. When Sargonovus was 19, he and his father tired of each other and parted ways. Now Sargonovus wanders Southwood looking to build himself an empire using the most powerful of pre-Backlash weapons, a slaymachine, a weapon made from the blood of the slain forge god Shorus.

Yeah, this guy (and the next three or more) are from a post-apocalyptic setting I made for the roleplaying game Mutant Future, where the world was destroyed after a war with the gods, wherein the gods sacrificed most of their power to bathe the world in the light of creation, thus mutation most of the life forms on the planet. Incidentally, here’s another guy I made for this setting: http://stoneman123.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d2to5l9