Hi all, this is Hanin! I did the artwork for Kaya's Guide to The Fabric of History! I hope you all enjoyed reading it and trying out the subclasses. For this blog, I will be talking about the character design for the individual classes, and will showcase some concept art and sketches.

The first character design we did is the Barbarian following the Path of the Saga. The idea behind this subclass is that the very act of performance and singing tales empowers you and others as part of your rage.

For the visual development of this character design, we looked at Opera garbs of different plays. I wanted the dramatics and open strong stances that you find in Kabuki, Cantonese Opera, Indian Theatre, as well as Visual Kei and Glam Rock bands like Kiss, while still retaining the same visual language of leather armour that you expect your typical barbarian to wear. Because these are plays, I was also looking at monster designs drawing heavy inspiration from Kazuma Kaneko’s designs for the Megami Tensei series. Masks and makeup are also big points as I want to symbolise the barbarian changing sagas or “changing characters” during their rage.

We also experiment with using dramatic lighting as well as using Hamlet’s classic “To be or not to be” holding the skull.

When Igor was conceptualising this, he told me that he had the actors of Brunhilde in mind, so we decided to focus more in that direction. The costuming of the actors was instead retained for the Prized Fighter. As Brunhilde held a spear and shield, and in some cases a banner, we decided to give that to the barbarian. We also were figuring out the gender of this character and have decided that the barbarian would be a woman.

At this point, the image of the Barbarian became pretty clear.

And so we get the Barbarian! At this stage we were also figuring out the visual language for this supplement and as we get further, you will see it develop. What I definitely know is that I wanted to have unique interpretations of the classes with the themes of history in mind. I hope you find them interesting!

- Hanin