Thopter



Colour: Colorless
Stat Block: 1/1, Flying
Thoughts: The thopter. For this one I looked back to Bioshock, a super-cool game about reverse communism set underwater, then set underwater again, and then set in the sky for some reason with a pretentious sub-theme regarding lack of agency. Ahem anyways. The first Bioshock really scared me, it had that quiet mounting dread that accompanies really good horror. Most of the game I was creeping around trying to avoid being seen and subsequently ripped to pieces by the myriad of enemies that were stronger than me. Which is why the high-pitched whirr of the security bots is one of the most unsettling sounds from that game. I wanted to capture the feel of those little sentries the security cameras would send after you when you were spotted. Which is why I have a guy cowering in the foreground, he was likely doing something unsavory and is now being discovered. For the color scheme I stole Bioshock's cool and eerie lime green & brown color pallete, but the actual thopter design was heavily inspired by Portal's Wheatly. I've always felt that no matter the context thopters are kind of 'cute' and I wanted to retain that feel. I wanted the background to give a distinct impression of looking up so I went for a sharp angle. Finally, the wings. I looked into Thopters, and I regret to admit, I thought initially that like Slivers and Myrs they were a creation indicative to Magic. But No! They were created way before that. I think this is best encapsulated in the statement I made to a friend of mine when I first made the discovery I said "Did you know thopters aren't just a Magic thing? They're a Leonardo Da Vinci thing!". And the 'Da Vinci' thing that defines a thopter is it's webbed wings. While I couldn't wholesale copy the webbed wings of his original thopters, I did pay homage to it by retaining the same wing shape in this token.