Annotated 8-8
The sculpture’s a nice bit of foreshadowing, and in retrospect, it’s about the most generous gift one could imagine the goblins giving to the war effort in general and Harky in particular. Still, I have to wonder about the art market that thing’s gonna find. It sure isn’t going to sell to any Heads of Houses while the war is going on: even they would find that in bad taste. So it must be some relatively disinterested third party who’s going to pick it up: maybe from those distant lands we occasionally reference as part of Gastonia’s trade network.
This is my kind of scene: packed to the brim with details that paint a picture of this community and how it operates (food, shelter, laundry, economics, and perhaps the rudiments of religion) and yet there’s still a feeling of movement in both plot and characterization. For the most part, I had the first half of this chapter to write (though here, I was mostly just dramatizing Phil’s notes about the cultures) and Phil got the second half (with a few dialogue tweaks from me).
I think the art sculpture is very strange in that it doesn’t look like something any of the “Savage Races” would make. Everything they make have this rough, unpolished, kind of barbaric look to it, like the Horde in World of Warcraft. Like… developing savages. Then there’s this statue that is a well defined, well polished, perfect bust.
Well the Goblins seem very different than the rest of the World’s Rebellion. If they only had resources the Gastonians wanted or if Gastonia didn’t have the gnomes I would have expect Don Goblingo would find his way into the Heads of Houses.
I think the goblins have resources (otherwise they wouldn’t be able to donate a jewels-encrusted statue), but that they are not willing enough (from the Gastonian point of view) to part with them.
What I meant to point out is the difference in aesthetics the savage races has as a theme. Even with resources and knowledge, they’d make a working airship that looks like mismatching wood pieces and hammered together haphazardly, kinda rough on the eyes on many ways.
Then this bust is very well made art!
To be fair, an artisan is not necessarily an engineer, or vice versa. That many of the characters appear to be exceptional among their own races, especially on the WR side, in terms of the crafts they practice (in particular, the Goblin champion we are most familiar with), should leave us plenty of room for inference about what other professions a race might excel at but not be notorious for.
After all, Bandit isn’t exactly a prime example of her kind.
It took me a few minutes to understand the meaning of the sculpture. It wasn’t til I thought “Why carve out a torso and stick a gem in the belly butto… ohhhhhhh!”
It’s by renowned Goblin artist Daemeon Hheurst.
Daemeon was always a very unusual goblin. Why his name doesn’t even have “Gob” in it.
Yeah, this is still very early for me, “design-wise”. I hadn’t even begun to think about the “look” of the various races and their cultural iconography. It looked pretty uneven, didn’t it? But I guess that helped the whole idea of all these different races being thrown together in one community. It’s suppose to be a mish-mash! ;-D