Thanks to changes at work, I've had plenty of downtime and I'm not exhausted all the time, so it's time for the return of the 100 OC Challenge!
Four more characters from the RPG I never made in college, Silmerein! As always, new images up top, old below, and detailed character info (and essentially the story of the game) below the cut.
#73: Clarine le Roi
Idea: Joan of Arc If She Misinterpreted the Word of Christ
Story: Silmerein
#74: Merron Yngsil
Idea: Gay Priest Saves the Day
Story: Silmerein
#76: Gamel Jugrenon
Idea: Ottermode Ogre With A Giant Axe
So last time on The Big Silmerein Recap, I jumped around a little for organization's sake. Well now, it's time to get back to the part I skipped.
So now I'll go through [some] of the Paladins since I didn't quite get around to who would have been introduced at this time.
First is the leader, Clarine le Roi. A big fat fuckin' zealot who will carry out the letter of Imosene if not actually the spirit. We'll get into that more later. She's missing her right arm.
Next is Indarosh Tael, a wood elf. Wood elves are all about being apex predators, ball is life hunt is life, anything that's not related to hunting and the circle of life is bullshit. But poor Tael here wanted to be a bard. He was never very good at hunting and really didn't like it, so he'd usually fuck off to go practice art instead. Most of his clan was pretty embarrassed by him, but one guy who liked the cut of his jib happened to be Faed. Faed liked Tael's music, so much so that when he caught Tael's uncle beating him within an inch of his life, he killed the man to save Tael and gladly accepted the subsequent banishment.
Well Tael wasn't actually happy about that, because Faed had just broken about twelve different honor codes and now Tael looked even more dishonorable in the wood elves' eyes, so he's been hunting the man ever since.
What's made this even worse is that he's now missing his tongue thanks to Clarine's big plan.
[Fun fact: I wanted to parody chainmail bikini fanservice characters in games - you know, "she's gotta fight with her whole ass out because it's a distraction tactic!" - so I decided that the wood elves had their honor duels completely in the nude (though Tael would basically fight you in a fundoshi because you'd be in Polite Society when he found you and they look down on public nudity). I did this with the sole intention of making dudebros mad.]
[I mentioned Gamel briefly in the previous portion, but the only particularly notable thing about her is she's a Sea Ogre, mortal enemy of Dorom's Mountain Ogre tribe, and she joined up because she got tired of running trains on Mountain Ogres and wanted new people to fight. Like Dorom, her affected body part was her spine; unlike Dorom, she gets a snazzy new magitech one.]
[And now, back to where we left off in the previous installment.]
[Fella in pic 2] is Merron Yngsil, Priest of Rodimir.
Rodimir has come to save the day. Because as it turns out, the EVIL FOREIGN GOD was never actually evil at all. The avatar had been blessed with his power and then said "A-CONQUERING WE WILL GO!" So back in his home continent of Yngmir, Merron, bog-average priest, gets a message from God saying "Hey, guy, there's a shitstorm a'brewin, I want you to go and take care of it."
[In the original plan, he was actually visible at the beginning of the game. He and his husband would come into Talin's family store, looking for some fun souvenirs for their trip. At this point, the true purpose of that visit would be revealed as Merron observing the progression of the plague.]
So he gets to Silmerein just in time for everything to go fuckin' wrong, finds our heroes, and they formulate a plan. See, apparently, Merron can take the Imosene juice out of the various limbs and transfer them to other hosts, and they're going to do a supercharged gestation. Meanwhile, the Paladins will do what they can to keep Lima contained to Silmerein. So our heroes head to Yngmir, go through Soms Shit, learn everything they thought about Rodimir was wrong, etc. We get the jesus juice going, return to Silmerein, Merron takes the jesus juice into himself to start Phase 1 of Operation Beat Lima's Ass.
And I'll leave that, plus The Tentative Sequel Idea, for the final batch of guys.
Once more, it's 100 OC time, and here we have the second half of the main party members, in both full-size and PS2-output style. As always, new images up top, old below, and detailed character info (and essentially the story of the game) below the cut.
#72: Dynn Mortar
Idea: The Scientist
Story: Silmerein
Continuing where we left off in the story summary from the last post...
So next, you head to the badlands, just the rockiest, craggiest piece of shit land you ever did see. And as the party's heading through this bullshit, they see a rail-thin, scraggly-looking girl dragging herself across the road.
They bring her to the wagon, fix her up, and ask where she lives, but she is determined to get to Silmerein. Eventually, after the party tells her "Nah, we're taking you home, you're fucked to shit," she gives up and tells the party where she lives: a super-secret city lost to history deep in the badlands.
So back when the end times were happening, the few survivors had huddled together in this city. And once Silmerein had saved the day, most people left and never looked back. But some folks were far too paranoid to leave. And they were determined to make sure that anybody who left never found their way back. So over the centuries, people forgot it was there, and anybody who still lived there wasn't allowed to leave.
So this girl, Ilya Node, telling the party where it is is A Problem.
When they reach the city, they're lucky enough to be met by Ilya's mentor, a fairly dorfy engineer. And he welcomes them inside and whatnot, but once they're in, he tells them they're not leaving again. Meanwhile, Ilya is fucking pissed. She's healed up enough that now she's practically frothing at the mouth to get out of the city again, because she is on a fucking mission.
See, she and her younger brother, Leon, were orphans, getting along as you do. But one night, her brother was snatched right out of his bed, and Ilya happened to see it. She couldn't do anything about it because the plague had caused her legs to stop working, but she swore he had been taken by a Silmereinian. Nobody believed her, though, because how could a Silmereinian still have knowledge of the city? Pff, nah, can't be me.
So she had managed to hobble her way out of the city and walked far enough across the badlands that her leg braces and crutches totally shattered and she was forced to crawl. She was powered by THE FUCKING FURY. Well, as you're learning her backstory from her mentor, she revs up a mining mech and BAILS. She takes off for the mines, which are just a horrible labyrinth of caves, and figures she'll pick a point and start digging her way to freedom this time.
And unfortunately, this is about the point where the plot gets just slightly more vague because I hadn't quite worked out all the details. But the important thing is that somehow, Lima had to get into close enough proximity to directly touch Ilya off-screen. Because as we'll find out later, the only reason the big boss-fight-inducing freakouts happen is because Lima's causing them. So Ilya becomes a giant rabbit monster.
They have a fight, Triangle wins, Triangle man.
So Ilya's like "I guarantee you I'm burning Silmerein to the fucking ground when I get there, let's go." She's your big heavy hitter character, pilots a mining drill to fight.
Anyway, after badlands, our next stop is further into the mountain to meet the Mountain Ogres, specifically this guy, Dorom Kolos.
The Mountain Ogres are in a pretty constant war with the Sea Ogres as the Sea Ogres ran the Mountain Ogres out of their ancestral homeland. I don't remember what the exact arc of Dorom's story was going to be, but tl;dr his infection is in his spine, which is now wholesale jutting out of his back, leaving him in a constant state of pain that he medicates with alcohol. He's your drunken berserker whose super mode is a demon bear.
bearserker
This is about the point where you'd be properly introduced to the Paladins of Silmerein, the goon squad who are your initial direct antagonists as they're trying to keep you from reaching the city and/or kill you. Mostly kill you.
[I briefly cover the first one you'd probably run into, Gamel Jugrenon, but I'll leave that solo sentence to when I actually redraw her]
One way or another, you fight Dorom's demon bear mode and ward off the Paladins, and you head on to the next bit.
Next is a spooky little forest in a mountain valley where you run into a circus featuring one Nalien Urymere aka Nenali Maelstrom.
Nalien comes from a village in said woods which is horribly superstitious and believes magic use and consorting with monsters to be a capital offense. So when she grows bat ears thanks to the plague, her parents are terrified for her safety but don't think they'd be able to leave without raising suspicion. Fortunately for them, the circus had come nearby, and they asked if they would be able to take in Nalien for a short while. The ringmaster agreed, took Nalien in, and started training her in magic and acrobatics.
[Fun fact: the bat ears also reduced her eyesight, which is why she wears glasses.]
As with Dorom, I didn't quite get into when the Paladins would show up and how Lima would get Nenali alone to cause her freakout, but big bat battle under the big top happens. I presume the spooky villagers would probably show up to ruin everything.
The last place before hitting Silmerein is a laboratory high in the mountains that the party stumbles on. There, they meet this fellow, Dynn Mortar, a magitek scientist.
It's here that they'd find out a lot more about the Paladins, chiefly that they're all missing body parts for which Dynn had fashioned prosthetics.
[I make a brief swerve to cover all of the Paladins. We'll get to them next time.]
So back to Dynn, as you can surmise, he's the final host needed, and his infection's in his heart. So he turns into a monster squid. Because squids have three hearts. Look, I tried to relate the monster forms to the parts, and spine and heart gave me problems. Just like in real life amirite.
[For some reason, I didn't mention how Dynn's infection properly manifested, but: basically, it caused severe heart arrhythmia and wholesale heart failure. He had to build and install his own pacemaker to keep functional.]
But yeah, at this point, the We Have Horrible Demon Infection Crew is assembled, and the only thing left is to get into Silmerein, get to the monument, and get this party started. So by this point, there's been a budding romance forming between Talin and Lima, and you either get a confession before the big event or it edges real goddamn hard, I don't remember which I was going to go with. But you get to the city, you get to the monument, and that's when everything goes to absolute balls.
The romance was completely calculated on Lima's part.
Because, as mentioned, the whole point of this trip was for Lima to go about, collect the now gestating parts of the avatar of Rodimir, and return them all to the source so the avatar can rise again.
So Lima Does the Thing, but after all this time Being a Person, she doesn't want to just go back to being an unconscious part of the avatar. So she pulls a Pope Zera and subsumes his will. So now the avatar is well and truly dead and it's Lima's time to be in charge. Talin is fucking crushed, everybody's just lost a lot of power now that they're not hosting body parts anymore, Clarine [the leader of the Paladins] is freaking out because "Wait, didn't I do everything Imosene told me to? Why didn't this work?" And here's where we get into what her plan was.
See, while the avatar was busy seeding the plague, Imosene was functionally doing the same thing. But she had to expend a lot more juice to do it and wasn't able to craft a wholesale person like Lima to do the collecting. The best she could do was grab the first person who could hear her, and that happened to be Clarine. And all she was really able to tell her was to "gather the parts" and show her who she needed to find.
And Clarine interpreted that literally. She found everybody on her list, but thought she needed to remove the parts from them, not really knowing about the whole gestational period thing. So now we've got a whole lot of underpowered Jesus parts that can't be used for much.
Things are looking pretty fuckin' bad.
At least until this guy shows up.
And he'll be covered in the next batch, along with the first three Paladins of Imosene. So stay tuned, same Silmerein time, same Silmerein channel!
Day 5 of Repostober, and here's the last set of 100 OC redraws I did, the main party members of the RPG I wanted to make about fifteen years ago, Silmerein.
Maybe I should make one of those "fictional RPG" books out of it.
Wa-hey, two 100 OC Challenge posts tonight (because I totally forgot I was missing entries 61-64 lol). And rather than wait until I caught up on all the old uncolored images, I decided I'd just do all pics going forward in color.
Anyway, we've reached the sixteen (!!!) characters of the RPG I wanted to make in college, Silmerein. I never made the game, but the story stayed near and dear to my heart, so I decided I'd give the characters a little mock-up dialogue box. Since the game heavily (albeit accidentally) cribbed from Grandia II, I decided to lean into that with these redesigns. As always, new images up top, old below, and detailed character info (and essentially the story of the game) below the cut.
#65: Talin Stockman
Idea: The Hero
Story: Silmerein
#66: Lima Rayel
Idea: The Healer Waifu
Story: Silmerein
#67: Abarashil Faed
Idea: The Slutty Elf Thief Intended to Make Gamer Bros Uncomfortable
Story: Silmerein
#68: Amestris the Phoenix
Idea: The Desert Queen
Story: Silmerein
I wrote up a summary of the intended story of this RPG a few years ago for a friend, so I'll reprint that here and cover just up to the end of Amestris's story:
I birthed a whole concept for an RPG based around a single idea: what if your kawaii waifu healer was actually the villain?
Story starts a few centuries after the invasion of the avatar of a SUPREME EVIL GOD from a foreign land. Most of the continent the majority of the game takes place on is ravaged, but a lone woman blessed with divine power manages to beat back the demon hordes, fight the avatar for a week straight, and then strike him down with a MIGHTY BLOW, forever encasing the two of them in stone.
A religion forms around the woman, Silmerein, a holy city is built around the monument, civilization rebuilds. Not everybody's down with the religion, of course, but it becomes one of the major institutions of the continent.
Shortly before our story starts, the continent gets hit with a variety of plagues.
To most, they don't seem related - people in the heartland slowly losing function in their arms, the desert people going blind, various other maladies. On top of this, there's been an uptick in mysterious monsters being spotted in the wilderness.
Our starter hero, one Talin Stockman is one such plague victim. But his is a little different from the other victims in his hometown. As it turns out, his entire left arm has become monstrously deformed, and occasionally has a nasty habit of trying to strangle him in his sleep.
But he keeps it under wraps and works diligently at his family's general store, until it's visited by a young cleric of Silmerein, Lima Rayel.
Sometime that night, the village - and more specifically, Talin - is attacked by one of the mysterious monsters, and Lima comes to his rescue. She has a theory as to what's going on: she believes that the plagues are actually being caused by the essence of the avatar of Rodimir (aforementioned evil foreign god) escaping its prison and leaking out into the world. She thinks that it may be searching for hosts to concentrate and gestate within in order to return to power. And Talin happens to be one of those hosts, what with his monster-attracting arm. So, she tells him her plan: travel to the plague-affected lands, find the hosts, and bring them to Silmerein so they can be purified at the monument.
So she and Talin set off to ADVENTURE. Their first target actually winds up coming to them: the elf thief Abarashil Faed. The wood elves mostly avoided contracting any plague, and that was because Faed hadn't been anywhere near their city in a few years, having already been exiled for murder (we'll get to that later).
So like the pieces of Valmar [from Grandia II], each host tended to have a specific part that was affected, and in Faed's case, it was his tongue. So he'd be prone to fits of uncontrollable chattering in languages he couldn't understand, which is very not helpful when you're trying to ambush people and steal their shit. Also, in actual combat, each host would get a super mode where they turned into a massive monster related to what part of their body was infected. I think Talin turned into a giant wolf, but Faed definitely turned into a snake. It functioned kind of like Milennia's rage mode.
Anyway, I think most of Faed's plot was he steals our party's wagon (because Talin's a merchant so he planned on selling shit between towns) and accidentally kidnaps Lima, they find out he's infected, you get your first boss fight against his corrupted snake mode, and then he joins the party because he'd really like to not do the uncontrollable talking thing anymore.
Next, your team headed to the desert city of Esteed, which is currently super locked down against foreigners, doubly so against people from Silmerein.
Shortly before the plague hit the city, their queen, Melpomene the Raven, went on a mission to Silmerein and never returned. Esteed never had a good relationship with Silmerein to begin with because they already had their own chief religion before the end times happened, and they really didn't appreciate missionaries constantly trying to convert them. But now they thought the Silmereinians were the cause of the plague.
Somehow, you get inside, though, just in time to see the inaugural parade for the new queen, Amestris the Phoenix. Lima's got a sense for hosts, and she's convinced Amestris is the next one, so they try to figure out a way to talk to her and tell her what's up, but no dice. They were lucky enough just to get into the city to begin with.
So instead, Faed breaks into her palace at night, tries to talk to her in her room, has a one-on-one fight, and just manages to convince her to listen. She says, "fine, I'll listen, but you have to do something for me first. Our city's been under constant siege by these horrible monsters. You ensure my people are safe, I'll go with you."
So your trio heads into the desert and fights some critters. You go back to the palace with proof, Amestris is like "Alright, cool, we'll head out tomorrow," and then fate decides that's the perfect time for Amestris's definitely infected eye to summon another horde.
So now everyone's convinced that this was an orchestrated attack, your squad gets tossed in the dungeon, and Amestris prepares drastic measures once the fighting stops. The next day, she's going to enact an ancient ritual to summon the gods and end this bullshit once and for all, and said ritual involves her burning to death on a massive funeral pyre while the city prays in unison.
So Lima's like "Okay, no, we gotta stop that, we don't know what'll happen if she dies with the host part still in her." You get out of the dungeon, fight your way to the city's coliseum and Lima manages to stop Amestris before she burns, but Amestris's eye goes out of control, like Talin's arm and Faed's tongue did, and she turns into a giant fucked-up phoenix and you fight her atop the pyre. You kick her ass, take her back to the palace, and tell her what's up.
So she's like, "Alright, well, that didn't work and I guess you guys really do know what's going on, so I kinda have no choice but to go. Maybe I can figure out what happened to my sister."
And the story continues in the next batch of character art!
