Kithkin: Warlock

And here's the final piece for a while, as I've really got to get to the other pile of things to do on my list!

So this here is a brun warlock... told ya I had that on my to do list. And hopefully I'll actually finish that off this summer, 'cuase it includes HUMIES! And other races who I've been unfairly ignoring. But still, this is about this pic, not the others which may or may not be coming down the pipes!

So then, warlocks... well, they're the dark mirrors of the shaman, if you will, so no, we ain't running off D&D rules here. While shamans invoke the beneficial ancestral spirits to bring various boons upon their clan, warlocks basically force more hostile spirits to their bidding. Most of these are merely savage nature or elemental spirits, things like fire or thunder beings, or wolf or cougar spirits (or their six-limbed reptillian counterparts from Cirundi), such as the little familiar spirit wrapped around this warlock's arm, but some of them can get downright nasty, or, dare I say demonic?

Which is partially why practitioners of this form of sythen magic were branded WARLOCKS by the Caelean church... they like to do stuff like that, and then send hordes of Inquisitors after said heretical targets. Have a blurb on the Imperial Inquisition here in my gallery if you're interested in browsing through. However, I'm getting sidetracked. Basically, these sythen psionicists are termed warlocks by outsiders much like how shamans are termed shamans, because that's what it looks like to them, weather the kithkin, or sorry... sythen, like it or not.

However, unlike Caeleans, where warlocks are run out of villages ahead of a mod of pitchfork and riffle-wielding townsfolk, sythen clans will normally have handful of warlocks (from 2, master and apprentice, to a small coven) which are seen as a rather helpful part of daily life. While they might not quite have the ability to benefit a clan like an artificer or a shaman, they are an immense help whenever careful wrangling of a spirit is called for... weather in a confrontation, or when brute force is needed in clearing paths, freeing waggons, or blasting a cliff side into a quarry.

Quick notes... again, the dreamcatcher shows faith in the spirits, while the threa-pom indicates one trained in the arts of sythen magic. The red glow around the warlock's rune indicates that she's bonded right now to the spirit, whose colour in this case is red, and is using him as a familiar. Not all spirits look like this fellow here... they can appear as anything, from a tree to a frog floating on a cloud, to a flying vampire skull, to a mirror of the caster. This is just a relatively weak elemental one which the warlock can safely bind and use as a familiar. Also, with this pic, we've got ourselves another syth gender reference sheet, as this warlock here is a thearnaag, the shaman is a vaernaag, and the mageknight is a kyrnaag. Huzah huzah! How can one tell, one may ask. Uhh... it's complicated. I am working on making it a bit easier to tell them appart, but it's still very much a work in progress. I'll tell you when I get a solid idea though... right now I'm leaning on shoulder-chest fuzz... thears having a much fuller "ruff" then vaers. Of course, that would be compounded by race, and so this brunish thear should be extreemly fuzzy... something that didn't come out. So, still in the concept phase!

Anyhow, I'm rambling again onto things you don't really want to or need to know. As always, feel free to ask me if you've got any questions, comments, or confusion I can help you with!

The brun race, their sythen cousins, and all related info belong to yours truely, , but if you're interested in taking one for a spin, just drop me a line!

Brushes for grass, leaves, trees et al obtained from Obsidian Dawn, at [link]