The Council of Spiders, Part 1 (Revised)

He's busy with that.

When I first created the "re-make" of Ryltar, I did not have a good picture of the character that appears on the card. I suggested at the bottom of the post that I would revisit the character once I had a clean shot of the Drow warrior. When I finally realized that the image used for Ryltar was actually from Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, I was somewhat surprised. I had access to the picture the whole time (through the D&D Art Archives). Keeping that in mind, I poked around and found the original picture.

Of course, imagine my surprise when I discovered that the picture was much busier than I would have imagined. The entire bottom of the photo involved the severe slaying of a bullywug (or some other sort of froggy like creature). The red background was similar to what I worked with before, so that was not especially frustrating. The Drow warrior still had the quiver on his back, a thing that I still found surprisingly irritating as the character did not have a bow. Most surprising, though, was that the image had been flipped horizontally. All of these facts seemed a bit peculiar but I was willing to work around them.

New and Improved Ryltar

Now with additional abilities!

Some people may question the color change. D&D: Encounters character cards have always been color coded in such a way that you can easily determine what type of character it is just by the color. Of course, the thing that is being color coded in the classic cards is the power source (Psionic, Martial, Divine, Primal, or Arcane). Honestly, when I realized how the colors were chosen, it did not take long for me to decide against doing that. Although it would have been easier to keep Ryltar's background red as it goes better with the original image, I wanted all of the Drow characters I made to share background elements. As it ends up, this card uses the same background color as another card I worked on at the same time, so that's the reason for it. If I were more clever, I would have color coded them by House affiliation.

As the new Drow character themes were available, I changed Ryltar to be a Bregan D'Aerthe Mercenary which gave him a bonus to his Bluff check and a new combat ability, Skullduggery. All around, this version of Ryltar is actually quite playable and I hope people find him an effective replacement for the original.