Aww yeah. The Ulon Dosi village. I have to say I’m really happy with the look of this village.
It went through a lot of iterations and I had a hard time locking down an overriding and recognizable aesthetic. That’s generally important to me since I want different locations and races to have very clear visual cues, not just minor differences. I had settled on the round look of the main huts, with their hide roofs, wooden support arms, and central chimneys, but I didn’t have a larger idea to make the village itself something interesting.
Around the same time, I was reading a travel book on Morocco, since my wife and I were planning a vacation there, and I read something about some Berber villages in the High Atlas Mountains. The description mentioned terraced fields, and that suddenly became the feature I was looking for. I knew this particular Ulon Dosi village was going to be higher up in elevation and I had already established a very rocky look to the terrain, so it made complete sense to make the entire village composed of terraced levels.
I particularly like the idea I came up with to have some of the terraces run into and be contiguous with the rock bases of some huts.
They kind of make me think of a more sedentary version of a Mongolian yurt.
Yes, the village landscape feature use makes eminently sense. I also like the smoke pipes, which likely contains clays easily found as remains of weathered rocks all over the landscape under the snow (the differential light absorption melts dirt to collect under the snows), but also could have some of those terrain rocks incorporated when the result of the fractures fit the bill.
Those rocks could be used from anything from tables and seats up to parts of buildings. (If it wasn’t an ice planet we would surely have found them as village stepping stones to accommodate the seasonal mud.)
In a regular campaign this is where you call in your orbital bombardments or strafing runs…
What happened to the Female Dose Doe? Is she the Thane of this little refugee village while Captain Touchy (which also sounds like a serial molester’s name) is the warchief?
Wow, lookit them space cabbages growin’ in the snow! Or is that space lettuce?
Make that space snow lettuce!
Or perhaps Ulon Dosi Lettuci?
I like the look of the village.
Here’s hoping for some more wide and long shots so we can admire it.
Ril looks brave with that dagger in front of his beak, which makes the look on his face in the second last panel even better.
Why not “super” ice lettuce?
Presumably the snow world have a seasonal light cycle, or the plants would have trouble coordinating their growth.
Unless they use some type of “plant pheromones” for signaling – in which case they would do it for pollination purposes. “Sex plants in space!” Now at your local theater.
They look similar to the ones on Bocce’s farm in the flashback. So probably another thing Bocce did not need to see. Kaagan-Vas plus Super Space Ice Lettuce-cabbages plus small village might equal Bocce flying into a PTSD episode and doing something.
I was going to make an ICEberg lettuce joke, but I figured that would be lame. But then again, I’m not above a lame joke, so… ICEberg lettuce!
As for Ril’s reaction, yeah, I”m pretty happy with what I went with there. I had no real facial expression in mind when I wrote the scene and imagined he’d have a somewhat surprised and scared look on his face with a dagger at his neck. But when it came time to draw it, I thought it would be much more interesting to have Ril stand his ground. So he’s a bit surprised at first, but he doesn’t cower and apologize, which I find to be a cool little unplanned character moment.
Of course once the dagger’s gone, you can see the relief on his face and see that it was just a front of bravery and he actually was a wee bit concerned.
Of course there was also an opportunity for a Crocodile Dundee moment.
“You call that a knife?” Ril, ever the one for weapons on his person, says as he pulls out a 90cm super vibro-machete, “Now this is a knife!”
Roka and the rest stand there in a mix of wondering what chaos will ensue and just where Ril was hiding something that big in the first place.
Sounds like a nice bonus content feature for the printed version. 😉