Goblingeddon: the party portrait

A character sheet rarely tells you anything useful about a party. This does.

This is the cast of Goblingeddon, a D&D campaign I drew the party for. Four adventurers, none of whom are quite doing what their class would suggest.

• The ogre is the obvious frontline — enormous, yellow, all forearm — and he's spending the encounter reading a book titled Biography. Strength as a stat, literacy as a personality.
• The sleeping goblin rides on his shoulder, fast asleep (Zzz), still somehow holding a glowing green sword pointed at nothing. The most dangerous member of the party and the least conscious.
• The elf in the red cloak is the one taking it seriously: high collar, daggers, a rolled scroll marked DEED. Carries the paperwork, carries the mood.
• The hooded goblin crouches on a crate stencilled Hastigar's Emporium — a name with a backstory I didn't get told and didn't ask about.

The fun of drawing a party is that the composition has to do the characterisation. Nobody's looking at each other. The ogre towers but is checked out; the elf is dead centre and unimpressed; the goblins are doing their own small, green things at the edges. That's the group dynamic before a single line of dialogue.

Flat colour, heavy outlines, a palette of basically three hues — yellow, red, green — held together by white space. Drawn for the table, not the gallery.