Okay, that should do it for Karnoz and Sylvea. I'll have to crunch a little XP for Corwin tonight too. Man, SEAMUS' condensed posts include some of my posts too. It gets a mite confusing to read.

More tonight after sleeptime. Be good.

LMAO!! My music is from ElderScrolls!!! That is sooo cool! I spent hours listening to that stuff! LOL

I played morrowind.

Ah, I figured you had at least played that one, seeing as that's the game where the tune had come from, and you recognized it. Daggerfall was pretty neat too, for being a huge fiesta of two-dimensional sprites. I was thrilled when Battlespire came out with fully 3-D models for most of the characters, but they might as well have been made out of Lego blocks by the time the characters in Morrowind made them look well beyond obsolete.

Anyhoo, apologies for the weeklong delay in getting back on Sylvea. Often it's because I'm simply AFK and busy with boring real-life stuff, but at times it's also because the House of Ainsley campaign demands plenty of ongoing preparation behind the scenes, measures which aren't immediately evident. And sometimes, I do come across minor stumbling blocks. This evening, I've been working on more of my Gametable pogs and underlays in anticipation of the three prologues in progress...Corwin's eventual arrival in the tiered port city of Feldenstadt, as well as possible future happenings for both Sylvea and Karnoz in such places as Trock Reik, Palemare, the Crown Diamond foothills, the Hlina Hrnca river and, eventually, the various roads and sea routes which end in Bardosylvania, as well as Corwin's (likely) eventual trek across the ocean floor as he returns to his cursed homeland fifty years after he was lost at sea.

(Even on those infrequent occasions when I do railroad my players, you see, I still make a point of ensuring that the rails are made of rubber, and sometimes the players do crazy things which stretch the rails or break them entirely. But I'm pretty good at improvising and Game Mastering on the fly. Ask GD over there. )

On that note, I've come across a slight stumper during my pog making.



Does this young frost giant look male or female to you? Because I ripped that pog from this pic...



...in which the subject looks manly enough, in a somewhat androgynous way. But shrink the picture and add a circular frame and some transparency, and suddenly it's not so easy to tell. Bear in mind that the women among giants tend to be pretty muscular sorts too; the men are bigger and burlier, of course, but all adult frost giants have Strength scores around 29--enough to lift somebody's turnip cart and hurl it over the nearest thorp, at least--regardless of sex.

So should I title this pog as a frost giant male, a frost giant female or--saints forbid--a frost giant either-or? Because I'm honestly stumped here.

(So why am I so worried about frost giants when a single frost giant would be really bad news for all three of our player-characters combined, let alone whichever one may or may not actually run into this giant by his or her lonesome? Well, I'm the type of DM whose monsters aren't on aggressive kill-everything mode 24 hours a day. Sometimes, a frost giant just wants to mosey on down through the foothills, grab a cow and mosey back into the mountains to have lunch. Sometimes, the giant's laid out on a crag taking a nap. And sometimes, the frost giant just got torn up by something bigger and meaner, the giant's limping and bleeding all over the place and the last thing the giant wants is to get into another fight. My monsters have character, you see. It all adds to the story like that. )

http://fc00.deviantart.com/fs19/f/2007/249/b/8/Frost_Giant_by_boudicca.jpg
http://fc07.deviantart.com/fs30/f/2008/109/a/1/Mythos_Frost_Giant_by_poojipoo.jpg

Giants are awesome. Dragons are overrated.

Ah, screw it. That's a young man of a frost giant. Male it is.

It's kind of funny; Google up some pictures of giants and you'll see a bit of a disparity. Giant men are almost always big, powerfully built and usually bearded, and they typically look fairly human; you have some ugly, monstrous-looking giants out there and some beardless giants, but they're more the exceptions than the norm. Giantesses, on the other hand, are more often pictured as being lithe and slender and willowy and supermodelish...not what you expect in a creature which has been known to tear up trees and swing them around like clubs. It's hard to find muscular giantesses on the internet, it seems.

A lot of what our Western cultures depict giants as being is derived from Norse mythology, where you had the Jotun--the frost giants--being big and towering and dangerous, yet they were still fairly human-looking (enough so that they enticed, mated with and procreated with Aesir, Vanir and mortals alike from time to time). And yet they're still burly and powerful enough to stomp all over Asgard, come Ragnarok. There have been a few other myths and legends about giants scattered around the world--including the giantkin of ancient Greece--but for the most part we owe Scandinavia for the existence of giants...or, at least, tales and legends thereof.

(Trolls too. Google up some pics of the trolls from Changeling: The Dreaming. Big, burly, intelligent, blue-skinned, small-horned, large-melee-weapon-favoring and distinctly Scandinavian. That's what I think D&D trolls should be like, not these green-skinned brocolli-looking freaks with the obscenely long, pointy noses that really must put the troll's regeneration to the test when some greatsword-swinging barbarian hacks their noses off about once a round. But anyway....)

Obviously, there are some exceptions to the notion of humanlike giants; D&D's hill giants are basically big, ugly, misshapen Neanderthals, more like a larger and equally malformed ogre or Jack's brutish beanstalk giant than a Norse Jotun or a Greek Titan. And the bald, slate-skinned stone giants are another matter entirely. But they're all pretty well humanoid...no tusks, scales, elephant ears or anything like that.

Anyway, I'm rambling again, so back to the posting I go. I seem to have forgotten what point I was trying to make, anyway; maybe it'll dawn on me later.

Either way, its a impressive pic.

I personally would have picked the POG as female. Not the picture (cos I could see the rest of him) but the POG.

Oh btw....

I LOVE Ariean's pog. Its fantastic!!

Hmmm...that frost giant does have quite the set of boobs, eh? Or maybe they're manboobs. Or just plain boobs. I dunno.

I'm glad you like Ariean's pic! It's nice that Paint Shop Pro can do so much to a pic, seeing as that pic was an ordinary living Warcraft elf before I "undeadified" her with some applications of Magic Wand, Darken, Lighten and Desaturate, with an application of light blue (at 50% opacity) for the lips and some paintbrushing of Eyedropped hair color to restore some hairs across her face that accidentally got desaturated. And to think that people will pay ten times as much for Photoshop....

Okay, back I go to juggling the Chat Box, Corwin's post and Sylvea's new post. Tally ho!

Shadow thought they were muscles. I thought they were boobs....

So... muscular boobs? LOL!

Could we get away with a female frost giant body builder?

Yeah, that seems fair. Heck, Frosty there could be a hermaphrodite for all we know....

Let's not ask....

Hmmm. But don't frost giants typically have beards? Maybe Frosty is a giant woman...giantess, whatever. Or maybe not. Arrrgh, my head is killing me now....

Perhaps you should shelve... him/her... and find a better piccy?

Perhaps something in Evening Wear?

Or armor. Frost giants have some pretty snazzy-looking armor, judging by all the pics out there.

There are some sexy, scantilly clad giantesses out there on the Net, but I hardly imagine them being the bullying raider type. Unless they use their seductive wiles to get what they want, maybe. "Huh huh...huh-huh-huh...titties! Huh-huh-huh...as big as my turnip cart! Huh huh huh...." "Hey, Earl! She's walking off with your turnip cart!" "...urrrr? Oh. Didn't notice. Huh huh. Boobies...."

i have no plans for the moment so i'll be posying replies as long as you keep makin em ainsly

Well unfortunately I've got to be abed. It's early morning here. So I'll catch you guys later.

I've been up all night myself, so I shan't be long for bed either. But we'll knock off a few more posts with Corwin and Sylvea, sure.

So, SEAMUS! Frosty. Up there, with the big white wolf, casting a shadow across a two-story house. Giant or giantess?

it's a chick

Hmm...and Wraith agrees. I guess maybe it is a giantess. With a big dog. Which obviously isn't there for protection, since she's as big as a house.

Now watch GD swing by and say that Frosty's a dude, just to put us back into a hung jury again....

I gots strong-armed by Maz/Seamus here into posting an intent to join. I tried to tell him I'm a terrible RP'er but he laughed. So I guess I can give it a shot, after all the worst that can happen is I explode, right?

....

Right?!