A couple of posts ago you may have noticed some great penciled images of rodians. I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the creators of those images since I have posted them here without anyone's permission. I think it is very rodian-like of me to have pirated them, and I hope the artists involved will not object to my using them here, since I have so few other images of rodians and not much drawing ability of my own.
These first two images, the full body shot above and the profile head shot below, depict Rajannara, the first-ever rodian PC, played and drawn by Nick Edgar. Both of these images were scanned from Raja's original Crimson Blades of Ara character sheet, which must have been created circa 1990 or so.
According to Nick's character sheet, Rajannara was a thief type, which probably reflects our (subconscious) impulse to have rodians fill a halfling-esque role in CBoA adventure parties. At the beginning, they were more thieves than warriors, though we knew from the outset that rodians were expert sailors and sea pirates, so you can see (top illustration above) that Raja carries a curved cutlass-type sword.
This third illustration is by
CBoA's co-creator, Dave Miller.
Dave really deserves most of the credit for fleshing out rodians. Dave introduced the famous
Karibekian clan to Ara via his legendary rodian duellist PC, Saladar Karibekian. Through Karibekian and his relatives and successors, Dave gave rodians more credibility as fighters, and introduced the whole concept of secretive rodian magical research and
the Black Cloister. This drawing above shows the direction Dave envisioned for rodians beyond being sneaky thieves.
Ah, just you wait till I draw Barbarella Bootay, my con-artist cum swashbuckling rodian vamp!
ReplyDeleteI am bummed that I will have to miss the campaign kick-off tomorrow, but I will be there the week after with Barbarella and her ample curves!
I figured you might be able to fill in some gaps vis-a-vis rodian artwork. I too will be sad not to have you there the first night -- Emily is missing the first session as well, due to illness -- but given the number of new-to-the-game players in this group, it might work well for me to be able to give them more individual attention the first night, so the smaller numbers can be seen as a slight advantage in that sense. Anyway, we will look forward to Barbarella joining us on the second night!
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