Garou Versus Technocracy

Media were 0.5 mm mechanical pencil, 0.2 mm black Pigma Micron marker 005, eraser, scanner, and finally MS Paint with a GE corded mouse.

The initial premise for this drawing was from a while back when I was trying to figure how to re-learn the rules for how White Wolf's (20th Anniversary) rpg system. So, after getting out some scratch paper and rolling a twenty-sided die for a few trial runs, I finally figured out how a mage could beat a werewolf of equal level. (I was as surprised as anybody. LOL)

(Yes, I'm aware that if the garou in the picture would have been an elder Ahroun or had mini-maxed stats, that mage would be dead meat. Still, I was pleasantly surprised that werewolves weren't the instant TPK that we've been told to believe.)

I found it to be a fun problem-solving challenge to try and come up with a way that a mortal mage, including characters from the Technocracy, could actually stand toe-to-toe against an equal number of garou in crinos form.

One aspect to Mage which I've admired, in addition to the whole richness of the World of Darkness's background details, was that in Mage, players are basically encouraged to use the rules to get around the rules.

i.e. Creative players thrive in Mage. It's not cheating; it's built-in to the system. Coming up with a cool visual in your head for how to supernaturally lift a piano up to a rooftop DOES get rewarded, even in a system which is notoriously lethal and bleak upon characters.

So, after challenging my brain by trying out a few White Wolf combat-oriented scenarios with a d20, I began to get inspired by the challenge of how to visually depict it in artwork, too.

Fight choreography IMO is very, very hard to depict in a static, two-dimensional medium such as paper or a .jpg and comic book artists have been trying ways to get around the problem for decades. (I'm more of a fan for how motion pictures and animation can depict the linear cause-and-effect nature of fight scenes.)

So, I knew I had to come up with a way to make all combatants's allegiances recognizable. I also needed to use poses which were both realistic-looking for critical martial artists and visually interesting enough for laypeople. Third, I wanted to draw fighting styles which made sense within the limitations of the characters. Fourth, i needed poses which looked original enough that viewers haven't seen them a thousand times already in other people's DA galleries. Fifth, I needed a flow of visual movement which lets viewers guess what moves came before and what moves might come immediately afterward.

For the background, I knew beforehand that I wanted to use the nostalgic and easily-recognizable visuals of the circular dots from all of White Wolf's character sheets. Then I realized that it would be fun to include formalized representations of the shorthand which I had used while rolling the die.

Likewise, the glyphs at the top of the page are a sort of code. Fans of White Wolf/Onyx Path's game systems will recognize that those symbols actually say, from left-to-right...

1. The werewolf is an Uktena theurge who uses Rage to protect the Wyld inside the spiritual dimension known as the Umbra.

2. The man is a member of the Technocracy, specifically the Void Engineers, whose major sphere of "magick" is in dimensional science (spirit). He is viewed from a garou's perspective as belonging to the Weaver, and he travels through the Umbra.

Other potential titles for this drawing were:
Property Lines (Has nothing to do with what's visually present in the picture.)
Garou Wendigo Vs. Technocracy Void Engineer (Too wordy, and I'm not sure it's a Wendigo.)
Al One Doesn't Care About Your Rage (Too disrespectful towards Werewolf fans.)
Wyld Vs. Weaver (I decided to put that theme into symbol format at the top of the drawing.)
Disagreement Over A Cairn (Like "Property Lines", this title is accurate although confusing.)
Younger Brothers Vs. Namebreakers (This ALMOST won.)