Help requested

[tooitalian]

Greetings to you all

I understand how busy you all are on your own projects and your busy daily lives. That being said, if anyone has an opportunity to help contribute to a project of mine, I would be indescribably grateful. I am no artist, I have not the tools or the talent to draw. A lot of the artwork has already been done by various artists a while back. The project is the original Dark Elves.

I have redone the campaign and rebalanced the units, but as I said before, I am no artist. Please, please help me with this. I love to write, but drawing is something that I have never been able to do. I would love to see these completed and have an enjoyable campaign.

[Alternatic]

Hello and welcome to the forums!

You should specify what you need. Do you mean like recreating the whole fraction or just adding or redoing few sprites? If you need just a little there is much higher chance that someone(including me) will try to do it. But if you want someone to make something as complex as making a whole new fraction, well, than I seriously doubt that someone will do it .

[tooitalian]

No, I do not want the whole faction recreated, I only need a few sprites, a retouch on a couple of sprites. Animations would also be sweet but I don't want to ask for too much, so far only the Fighter, Hunter, and Lizard Rider have some animations. Attached is the artwork that I currently have, what I would like to see done is:

Captain and Marshal: Remove the sword and holding the sword-staff with both hands, and the sword staff looking more like a sword staff than a curved spear.

Enchantress, Sorceress, and Cleric: They need to be redone. The unit line is supposed to be destructive and suggestive. I'm thinking a two piece purple uniform

Hunter, Stalker, Shadow: My only complaint is the color of their uniforms. They should be more greyscale. They are a skirmish unit with cavestalk (ambush in cave tiles)

Wizard, Sorcerer, Defiler, Warlock, Necromancer, Magnus: This will be the biggest project of all, as I am adding 3 more units to the line and some modifications are needed as well. The Wizard is fine, it does not need any work, but that's it with this line. It would probably be best if I simply posted the unit descriptions and progressions below:

Sorcerer (FROM WIZARD ADVANCES TO WARLOCK): "Sorcerers have decided to dive deeper within themselves, and use the power of their inner twisted faerie. Most sorcerers serve under a Lord and educate the young in reading and writing in exchange for magical scrolls. Sorcerers wield long runic swords, and are capable of channeling their powers through it."

Warlock (ADVANCES TO MAGNUS): "Masters of the dark faerie, a Warlock is not one to be trifled with. A blend of the arcane and elven magic, Warlocks are in a class all to themselves, often fighting in the front lines side by side with the warriors."

Magnus: "Very few ever earn the title of Magus, only earned by a unanimous vote of the Council of Seven. The title of Magus comes with the special honor of representing the Matron Mother. Though not considered equal in rank to the Clerics, they do command a greater amount of respect for earning their rank and place serving the Matron Mother."

Defiler (FROM WIZARD ADVANCES TO NECROMANCER): "Some Dark Elves seek power through a more twisted path: necromancy. Those who walk down this dangerous path are called Defilers. They despise all life, and actively seek to kill all living things while they search for the secret of undeath themselves. Feared by even their Dark Elf brethren, all avoid Defilers at any cost or risk being tortured and used as a test subject."

Necromancer: "Walking death, literally. A Dark Elf Necromancer is obsessed with power. It is strictly forbidden that any Dark Elf become a lich, however there are no rules against raising the dead, a practice that Clerics use daily. Most Dark Elf Necromancers are so self consumed in their acquisition of power that they pay little head to politics, happily acting as a village or outpost leader in exchange for permission to practice their arts. When a Necromancer does reach too far or come too close to the border of Lichdom, the Council of Seven send an army of Warlocks to quickly contain them."

Thanks in advance for anything that anyone contributes

[Dugi]

It has happened a lot of times that somebody wanted to create or revamp a faction or a whole era, but the number of cases where an artist to help with the spritework is very small. It is very unlikely to happen that you'll find somebody willing to make sprites for you.
So, you have to do it yourself. Even if you can't draw a sprite yourself, you can create them using the technique called frankensteining. Frankensteining in most cases means that you create a new unit using the torso of an existing unit (possibly recoloured), place on it the head of some other unit (or the same unit, what is important is that it must be placed properly, that is, not too high, not too large, etc.). Then, add weapons from some other unit, possibly rotating and recolouring them. In the end, check if it looks good and make some fixes. You can also use this technique to animate the unit, separating and reattaching its arms and legs and rotating its body.
Some lordly people consider this technique inferior and ugly, but in most cases, it does the job.

Speaking if specific things you want - Captain and Marshal - to change weapons, just delete the old one, copy and paste a new one to it, detach and slightly rotate their arms to make them hold it better.
Enchantress, Sorceress and Cleric - two piece purple uniform you mentioned - smaller changes can be done quite easily. You probably want to uncover some parts of their torso, this can be done quite easily by making her thinner and recolouring the parts that should be uncovered. I think that the purple colour is a problem, because it might be confused with team colours.
Hunter, Stalker, Shadow - Selective conversion to greyscale is quite a generic function.
Wizard, Sorcerer, Defiler, Warlock, Necromancer, Magnus - Here comes the real work, recoloured torsos of some other mage units (can be human mages), adding the classical dark elf heads and using the staves the female spellcasters used should do the trick, though it would not be trivial.

One more thing: You can't use the words 'Matron Mother' there. In association with dark elven society, it is a part of the Forgotten Realms universe that is copyrighted, and you can't use such things if you will distribute your work through the add-ons server (even if you aren't required to pay for using them in your work). Dark elves appeared in many fantasy universes, giant lizards actually exist and huge systems of caverns exist in some places too. Dark elves with matriarchal society, where the leaders are called 'Matron Mothers' too close to Forgotten Realms. How about changing their society to some sort of mafia/clan/academy society, where the ruler would be unrelated to gender or mandatorily a man, called murderboss/overlord/patriarch/godfather/warlord/headmaster/something else?

[SkyOne]

I have seen those units before, somewhere around BfW 1.4. Are they yours? If not, you can contact with the original author.

They don't actually look too bad (except some shadows), just a bit old style. If you redraw the shadow like this:

de-captain.png (2.84 KiB) Viewed 4020 times

(of course not the best, but) they will be acceptable units as a UMC IMO (I am not an artist, though).

[tooitalian]

@Dugi Thanks for the tips, I could try doing if no one wants to contribute to the project, though I'm really hopeing it doesn't come down to that.

I'll think of a different term to use other than Matron Mother, you're right it is used in Forgotten Realms, but I am sticking with the matriarchal society configuration. I designed them as being the exact opposite of the elves as depicted in Wesnoth. If that concept has similarities to another previously made concept, then that's just it, similarities. Heck, they are not called Drow, don't even have driders or spider mages, and they are pale skinned not dark skinned. But, this is a discussion that should be left in the Faction & Era creation thread: http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=39248

@SkyOne
Thanks for the tip. The original author no longer plays Wesnoth, so I'm really on my own here. I'll try to hack some sprites together, but as I said before, I really don't want to do that.


I'm not asking for one person to make every sprite, I'm only asking that if anyone has a moment, pick one and work on it. It does not need to be done today, or tomorrow, just whenever and whoever feels like taking a shot at it.

[8680]

Dark elves with matriarchal society, where the leaders are called 'Matron Mothers' too close to Forgotten Realms.

I don’t know about the title, but “matriarchal society” should be fine — at least, it was last time.

Some lordly people consider this technique inferior and ugly, but in most cases, it does the job.

I was under the impression that frankensteined sprites are considered by most to be subpar in most cases, but I believe some exceptionally well-frankensteined sprites have even been accepted into mainline.

[Dugi]

I don’t know about the title, but “matriarchal society” should be fine — at least, it was last time.

Matriarchal society is quite weird, extremely rare in the past and almost absent in present (limited to the delirious theories of feminists). Many barbarian societies gave many rights to women, but being led by a woman was rare. If it happened, it was usually related to some strange theocracy (again, like the drow in Forgotten Realms).

I would not be so sure that a theocratic matriarchy of dark elves is safely far from the (Menzoberranzan) drow from Forgotten Realms. If their rulers were named Matron Mothers, it would be obviously copied, but it's hard to tell how close is it without it. Wouldn't an equality of genders be enough unusual?
From the other hand, there is a blackened death metal band named Lloth, with songs about Lloth the Spider Queen and consisting of four or five women, and I heavily doubt they pay any tribute to Forgotten Realms (but they later renamed themselves to Astarte, maybe because not enough people knew what Lloth was).

[tooitalian]

Everything is a little copy of something. I do not see the need to make the Dark Elves drastically different than the Drow. There will be inevitable differences but as long as we are not borrowing anything directly from Forgotten Realms, it will be fine. As stated before, the names and concept are different, though the society is similar. These are not Drow, these are Dark Elves.

If this is going to be an ongoing discussion I'd like it to be moved to the main thread for this faction, please see the link above.