John Blanche Is Dead

 John Blanche is dead.

Probably no artist in the gaming hobby was as simultaneously influential and original at the same time as he was. As artist and art director at Games Workshop, he was the key figure in creating and perpetuating the Warhammer Look that still sells gobs of miniatures to this day, and basically invented modern grimdark.

That kinda sells it short because he was also a huge part of what kept Warhammer weird--he had a creaky, eccentrically filligreed sensibility and a wonderful color sense that combined an electric modern intensity with a feeling for the weight of the past in a way nobody has ever managed to copy--war-banner red and the gold-yellow of bad teeth and age.

John Blanche pictures look like ancient records from an alternate universe where it all played out in a series of enigmatic and brutal cartoons. Like history paintings by a post doom-metal Terry Gilliam, everything is alarmingly vivid and yet completely inevitable. Prog rock in Hell.

His sense of anatomy and composition resisted the emphasis on optically plausible movement and scale that was so enthusiastically embraced not only in the fine art in the 400 years after the Renaissance, but by so many fantasy illustrators influenced by photography, comic books and guys like Frank Frazetta. Blanche figures don't move through space--they have always been there. He and a few like-minded neo-primitive geniuses like Ian Miller turned Warhammer and 40k's "backstory" and "fluff" into lore.

He could summon all the connotations of that word using an alchemy that made everything new old again. Anybody can make a picture and say it's something that happened a thousand years ago--with Blanche you felt it, even when they had space armor and bolt guns.

RPG artists can all depict war, these Blanche visuals were key to Warhammer's very cynical, British, and wargame-friendly sense of eternal war. Think Iron Maiden, Mötorhead, Garth Ennis, once more into the breach (and Bolt Thrower, of course). There's no fucking timeline in Warhammer, no progress, no revolution, no good guys, no solutions, no change in the setting, no leader you can trust, no reasons for any of it--you and another unworthy god met in school and now you will be moving miniature men back and forth on a hilltop you made forever.

His art and that of the colleagues he hired on and managed is the main reason that the British D&D crew at White Dwarf that turned into Games Workshop stood apart from all the other D&D competitors long enough to create a distinct identity.

And as far as I can tell, he was also really cool.

Rest quietly in the void, big guy. You've done enough.

Caroline Pierce Ate A Cat

 

If you know Caroline Pierce--outside of her, ahh, work--pretty much the first thing you know is she's a cat lady. Epic scale cat lady.

But last night she ate a cat.

Ok, technically her character ate a cat, Elaria, the half-elf ranger.

In her defense, it was because she refused to eat a person, so that's a good(?) sign.

I blame Session 2 of Maze of the Blue Medusa.

It went like this:

After last session our heroines wake up in the first room there at the bottom, barricade themselves inside and hope to regain spells etc and heal up for their next sojourn into the Maze.

They are interrupted after an hour by a polite knock on the door from 6 Bondye Reparatè (humans who believe the Maze is heaven and their job is to perform maintenance on it). They would never be so impolite as to bash down the door so they slide a polite offering of two hand-rolled cigarettes beneath the door and move on.

Despite Elaria, being a ranger and all, being able to identify these as ordinary hand-rolled cigarettes, a weirdly lot of time is spent trying to figure out what the cigarettes do (nothing except give you cancer 40 years after making you look cool).

The next hour a Chronomancer (lizard wizard) and a pair of his thrall mammals (ape-morons) show up. They kill one moron and steal the pearl that allows the Chronomancer to control the other and shoot him fulla holes before he can use his time-magic to reverse the damage. The newly-cnotrolled moron thus played an important meatshield/scouting role in the rest of the session.

Also note the girls made extensive use of the wardogs in this fight as they pounced on and murdered one of the morons, though out of deference to a recently deceased real pet Kimberly Kane's was turned into a war-cat.

You might see where this is going.

So anyway after defeating the Chronomancer, the girls went past the living chess pieces (basically a wise decision), used a mirror to investigate the Jade Tiles That Freeze You and inadvertently made them freeze themselves.

(Dialogue in this room:

Michelle: "Uh, I have Trap Sense?"

Zak: "You sense this is a trap.")

 ...and then cast Dispel Magic to make thetiles mundane enough to cross. Halfway through another Lizard Wizard attacks and gets beat up.

All this time Caroline Pierce is taking notes. 

Zak: "You take a lot of notes, CP."

Caroline: "Well the thing is your dungeons are always like a puzzle, none of my other games are like that."

Zak: "I don't know whether that's a compliment or not, but you're still around after 15 years so I'll assume its a compliment."

They investigate some more rooms and pronounce them weird. They are: the room with the snail golem, the room with the light-eating roses, the room with the grape juice.

Then they go into the Gallery section.

Those of you who have played Maze of the Blue Medusa know that in the Gallery section there's a mechanic that speeds up time and spoils food. So the PCs get hungry fast and will start to lose hp if they don't eat.

There are lots of solutions to this--the Create Food and Water spell, moving in and out of the gallery from the peripheral areas around it, stashing food in other places, etc., but a common one among the adventuring classes is cannibalism.

The PCs poke around at the magical artworks, including the paintings that show all the wounds you have, then encounter some cannibal critics! They hate art and want to eat the moron! (Contary to popular belief, Patrick Stuart made these monsters up. They are jussssst this side of too whimsical for me.) The PCs make quick work of them and Michelle's halfling Jinx wastes no time slicing off one's cheek and eating it. Kimberly Kane's cleric of the Great Maggot eats the other. I remind her the Great Maggot has no compunctions about eating flesh.

Elaria, a noble half- elf, abstains.

Soon they find the pit in the middle of the reptile-eye floor mosaic and head inside, down into the Reptile Archive. After accidentally annihilating the Nyctocaust Memorial (a touch-sculpture that is destroyed by light, oops) Elaria takes the multi-lingual warning sign ("please do not use light in this room") to see if she can start to puzzle out other languages from it. Clever.

Soon they wind up in the room with the clockwork needlebirds that tattoo you. They send the moron in first. He gets tattooed to death. Then they send in the pets. The cat gets tattooed to death. Only the terrier escapes.

Elaria helicopters in with her magic morningstar (the Steel Cyclone) and kills the remainder of the birds but it's too late. And she's hungry, losing hit points. She barbecues the cat.

Jinx attached the cat's tail to her hat. "Well we are using every part of the animal".

The rest is conscientiously sliced up into pieces and packaged for later. After a short fight with a chameleon women waiting to ambush them and passing some strips of tattooed flesh and undead bees, the crew winds up in the lair of the Lampen Proletariat, a wax golem who urges revolution against the masters of the Archive.

What will they do???? Find out next time!!!!

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