Fantasy Illness - Tumblr Posts

👁️👁️

Gelidasclerosis

Note: fake condition

Nickname: Medusa’s Condition

Symptoms:

First Stage: slower cognitive abilities can be noticed. This is usually a drastic change. Slower and slurred speech happens during this as well.

Second Stage: joints begin to lock up during this period which renders the personification completely unable to move, eat, drink, or use the bathroom. They become frozen in place while only being capable of blinking or moving other muscles that do not have joints to help hold their form (ex. Ears, eyebrows, nose, lips)

Third stage: all muscles begin to lock up and become unmovable. During this stage they cannot move anything.

Fourth stage: when this stage hits, the personification is no longer capable of responding to anything and they go into a comatose like state.

Procedure:

For the first stage, get the personification into a comfortable resting place immediately. This goes the same with the second and third stages

With the fourth stage, the personifications body stops working entirely. While their heart may still be beating, their lungs are not, so they must be hooked up to a ventilator.

First Discovered:

Unknown discovery date. We are unsure when this first appeared or when it even started happening.

Is it Chronic?: 

No

Other:

This is only capable of happening to government personifications

ID above the cut this time! I took up a good amount of space talking about the inspiration and process for this one, and wanted to make the ID easier to get to, so no one needs to scroll through it if they don't want to.

[ID: A portrait of a moon elf, from Dungeons and Dragons, shown from the shoulders up, facing forward. Instead of having hair, five mushrooms of various sizes have sprouted from their skin, and a couple on their neck. They wear silver earrings, and their left ear has a small notch carved into it. Small beads of a dark, red liquid are scattered across their cheeks and right shoulder, and are concentrated on areas where red blotches have started to darken the pale skin. Their eyes are completely red, with the left eye containing a thin webbing that is also starting to form on the right. End ID]

CW for a discussion focused around mushrooms, fungal infections, death to said fungal infection, and undeath. There's also mention of tree parasites, starvation (after death), and colonization.

Really, anything under the cut is extra; you don't need to read it if you're not comfortable. Please stay safe! (:

Hi! Get ready for an essay, because while I was taking a break from drawing, I wasn't taking a break from thinking about drawing, and I have a lot of unorganized thoughts about this piece, not just about the design, but the fictional fugal infection that its depicting.

I got my Spotify wrapped playlist, and wasn't surprised when Lord Huron's "Not Dead Yet" was my most played song. After all, it's one of my favorites, often getting me in the mood to create, and the inspiration behind a concept I have for another new OC, an undead-ish ranch hand. (It's a work-in-progress.) So over the past few days I've been listening to that song on loop even more than usual, and it put me in the mood to look into some different zombie video games that I have no intention of ever playing. I noticed that the zombie apocalypses I was looking at were all focused on humans turning, and I couldn't remember anything about a zombie plague for any fantasy races. Thus, I decided to create a concept for one that effects the moon elves from Dungeons and Dragons.

I decided that the condition would be caused by a fungal infection. Partially inspired by how European colonizers brought illnesses to the Americas, I decided moon elves would first encounter it when trying to colonize land originally inhabited by wood elves. I know that is the opposite of how it happened with the colonizers, but I wanted to change it up a bit. The fungus wouldn't be a concern to the wood elves, as they already had time to adapt and build up a resistance. However, once brought back to moon elf settlements it would be able to run rampant.

As many already know, elves live for a long time. In this universe that I am apparently creating now, part of the reason for that is that all of them, not just wood elves, are similar to trees, slow growing, and able to survive even when most of its body has been damaged. In the case of trees, it means that when a parasite such as Dwarf Mistletoe* decides to use a tree as its host, a slow race begins. The tree needs to keep growing in order to have enough branches to obtain enough oxygen, while the mistletoe tries to use that oxygen for itself as it tries to take over the entire tree. In some cases, the parasite remains inside the host for a long stretch of time before sprouting to release seeds.

Something similar occurred with the infected moon elves.

After the moon elves' failure to take the land from the wood elves, they returned home, not knowing they were carrying the fungus. It took around fifty years before anyone noticed something was amiss. Infected elves began to die from an illness that weakened them over time and reddened their skin and clouded their eyes. From there, it becomes a standard zombie story: they start to rise from their graves, mindless and seeking out living targets.

The zombies themselves are fairly passive, only attacking if one around them is attacked first. In most cases, they simply wandered around they areas they had risen from, then following living elves. They did not go out of their way to feed, so many would eventually collapse once their bodies finally gave out, either due to starvation or decay.

The main threat comes from the mushrooms that sprout from their bodies. As the mushrooms matured, they released their spores, which then in turn infected the living around them.

The main design inspiration for this was the Bleeding Tooth Fungus, a type of mushroom that, as its name suggests, looks like a tooth with drops of blood on it. I decided that moon elves, with their pale, blue skin, would match the fungus the most after the infection sets in and red blotches start to form. The mushrooms sprouting from the body are not based on any particular species, just slightly inspired by the mushrooms on my Animate Dead sticker. The disk shapes are fun to shade and detail.

A large portion of the line art on the face and neck were done with the symmetry tool. To hopefully keep the piece from looking too balanced, and to distract from the mirrored lines, I purposefully shifted the mushrooms and details in the coloring to different heights on the face.

For the red markings, I experimented with a different combination of brushes that usual. In most cases, I use a simple opaque brush and add details with the flat marker, thin gouache, and g-pen brushes, but I decided to use one of the airbrushes to add some finer speckling.

The eyebrows are only there because I liked the shape I had made them, and I thought the cool color would add some contrast to the area around the eyes.

Thank you for reading this far! I normally don't post lots of writing like this, but if you're interested in reading some more of my world building ideas, check out my side blog, @tired-spider. I'm more active on this blog, but I a lot of my art and world building ideas there, along side some DnD stuff and headcannons for different media I'm invested in.

Critique is always welcome, and I hope you have a nice day!

* It should be noted that I first learned about this on a hike a few months ago. So while I think that this is the type of mistletoe I was told about originally, I'm not entirely sure.