Greetings travelers. Welcome to another of our posts centering on one of the adventurers from Cora’s Champions, the tabletop campaign that I run with my closest friends. While we’ve taken a look at the full art piece of Anaria by Valence, it’s time to keep going down the list, and seeing all of the heroes in the group before long. Today, we’re looking at Pikeldorf, who is played by my brother, Matthew.
Valence started us off with a pose sketch that makes Pikeldorf look pretty heroic. By the time this art was being crafted, our dwarven ranger was already doing some pretty interesting stuff in the campaign, like hanging off a lighthouse with a grappling hook to gather intel on the party’s enemies. It was fitting to have this confident, almost arrogant look to Pikeldorf.
Now this next step isn’t Pikeldorf eating a super mushroom and growing bigger. It’s just part of Lance’s process to get more details into the character. You can now better see that there is a crossbow in our ranger’s hand, and that he wears a cloak, and has a few tufts of fur in opportune places in his outfit. We don’t outright say it anywhere in his backstory, I don’t believe, but I think that Pikeldorf is at least secondarily related to the dwarves of Clan Thunderfury, as his greatest enemies are harpies. Those warmer furs sort of imply that he may indeed be from a colder climate.
The earlier sketches don’t quite show as much beardiness as this latest focus. Matthew was already in the process of shaving his curly locks, so he and Pikeldorf look fairly similar here. We also see the color scheme a bit better as well. He definitely looks the part of a ranger, even with his small stature. But Pikeldorf has shown time and again that tough, hardy heroes come in small packages!
At this point, we were certainly making our way toward the end of our journey of bringing Pikeldorf to life. Some of the big changes we see here are some more details on the crossbow and the grappling hook (each of my characters who were part of session zero received some “lite” artifacts that they can use one per session that make for some pretty cool RP scenarios). We also see some polish on the rest of his attire, and a slight change to his beard. Matthew has a bit more of a bushy beard, and we wanted Pikeldorf to sort of mimic that.
And then here we have it, the final version of Pikeldorf, brought to life. Valence’s interpretation of Pikedorf was absolutely amazing, and Matthew was so happy with it. It’s going to be interesting to see where we go with Pikeldorf in the campaign, especially now that he has another dwarven character to bounce off of. Being able to see these heroes in all their glory goes a long way to bring them to life in new and exciting ways.
We’ll be back in a few weeks with another of Lance’s interpretations of our characters. Be on the lookout!
Michael DeAngelo
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