I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

I just do. She reminds me too much of Mari Jaiato take her seriously as a pretender.

Can anyone suggest an alternate sprite? Bonus points for less humanoid looks.

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Might be fun to have a human/Titan body with a "head" that's actually a 5 headed Hydra? She'd lose a head-slot ofcourse, but 5 poison bites would make up for that.

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Or maybe something like this?

As far as I can guess, it's from one of the Final Fantasys (probably XI). It wouldn't be too difficult to turn it into a sprite, I shouldn't think...

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

It´s a good idea, but I think that typing up six different creatures with different damage values is worthwhile


(Fully off topic: on regards to how to make Atlantis creepier, it just occured to me that some uniçue summons of Charybdis and Scylla -particularily Charybdis, if it can be given some adeçuatedly creepy ability- might be fitting. )


EDIT: PD: I hadn´t seen the second post. Looks very nice. Thx :D

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

That reminds me...See new thread within the next 5 mins.

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Oh, and as a sidenote: I made a search for "lamia" in images.google.es, and I got huge ammounts of Rule 34, so bonus points for finding a suitable image :p

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Charybdis is already in the game in the form of the Drakaina. That version is based on a more obscure version found in some mythological sources.

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

I think there's some confusion going around over whether Scylla or Charybdis was the woman with the lower body with the dog's heads:

According to all my non-Dominions sources (and I've been studying Greek myth for the past 25 years or so), Charybdis was the whirlpool monster, whereas it was actually Scylla that had the dog's heads. They were both apparently nymphs, and both were transformed into monsters and set to guard the Strait of Messina, so it's easy to get confused on this point.

Drakaina-again, according to my sources-had the upper body of a beautiful nymph, and the lower body of a sea serpent/dragon. Examples: Echidna, Ceto.

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Ah, my bad then, I managed to mix up the two. So Scylla is in, Charybdis is not. Unless you count Monster Fish as that.

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Mmmm somehow the words "monster fish" managed to make me hungry.

Edi, is there a way currently to mod in the ability for units to swallow up other units? I'm pretty sure it's in the game for one of the vanilla units, and it would be almost a given that Charybdis-if we decide to mod one in-would have such an ability. Besides which, I'd really like to add it to some of my other mods.

Thanks for your help!

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

The mother of serpents is a minoan figurine. Whats not to like :)

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Well, for a topless woman clutching two live snakes, she just looks a little too...matronly. Like somebody's dear Aunt Edna, if their Aunt Edna worked really hard core strip clubs.

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

looks to matronly... ehm she is called the MOTHER of snakes for a reason I guess :D she's not called the hot 'n horny lapdancer of snakes

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Well, dear old sweet topless snakeloving mother though she certainly may be, she still doesn't quite say "Mighty Pretender to Godhood" to me. She probably bakes a mean pie though :)

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Actually, not that many gods are awe inspiring. What about the 'god with backward feet', or the 'two-faced eater of filth'. I imagine most peoples have considered christ rather bland when they first encounter him. Pale, weak and impaled on a crucifix. Not very impressive :)

I once found this hilarious piece of text:

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Hey, don't touch MoS' sprite ! She's just fine like that. I love her Babylonian fierce and introverted look.

The alternate Final-Fantasy sprite I saw some posts ago is just a Disneyworld's joke :D

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

My biggest beef is that with size 5, the upraised hands, and the huge skirts, she reminds me of the cardboard giants that are displayed at rural festivities. I sort of expected a death and nature goddess to be more... awe-inspiring :p

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Kristoffer-I agree with you, gods aren't very dramatic in their original forms, taken as a whole. Usually just humans written large, or strange, or just deformed in some way. Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" had some great insights into that trend.

I understand that having something with a history behind it is ofcourse often preferrable to something made up, but I've always been of the opinion that there wasn't anything wrong with making things up, either. Especially if it helps tell a good story. That's what myths are, afterall, good stories that people believed. So I can appreciate and respect that she's a fine Babylonian icon-and I'm not the one who started this thread, keep in mind-but I can also understand the desire for something greater, weirder, more grand and mysterious and monstrous-to the eyes of our generation, as opposed to an ancient Babylonian native.


Also:
The request was for a less human version of Mother of Serpents, and I think I came up with something suitably inhuman-she's hardly a 'Disneyworld's joke', whatever that's supposed to mean...No mickey mouse ears that I could see? She's animated, true, but it was my reasoning that it'd be better to have something that could easily be transformed into a sprite, than not. Aside from that, Disney's responsible for some of the best animation ever made. So it's hardly an insult to compare an image to Disney's. Comparing real myths to Disney versions is ofcourse another story altogether, but artistically they're one of the highest institutions in animation-and share a great deal of the responsibility for creating-and certainly popularizing-the animation art-form, in the first place.

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

KO said "Minoean", it's me that erroneously assimilated the icon to a Babylonian look. ;)

Also, no personal offense was intended when comparing your sprite to a Disney thing. If you feel my note as agressive then please accept my apologizes. Don't forget I'm not an english native speaker and I may miss many nuances and subtleties when reading/writing english posts.

This being said, on a strictly aesthetic point of view, I can say 2 things :

- Personnaly, I definitely hate the Final Fantasy stuff and look. Sorry for that. I don't hate Snagga-like monsters, just FF ones. As well as FF heroes as a whole, at least the ones we often see as avatars in forums. That's just a personnal and deeply subjective matter, I agree.

- As for the Disney thing, I also agree they made great stuff... for children. I used to love many of their cartoons when I was a child. On the other hand, Disney iconography has greatly contributed to develop a sanitized aesthetic of mythologies (folklores/faery tales/etc) that I feel insuitable with the European tradition. I am European. So I don't favour Dysney, nor Final Fantasy, things. And of course I don't play Dom III as a "children oriented" game :p

But I'm afraid such considerations will drive us far away from the original subject of the thread. I just wanted to make my personnal and subjective point clear. I recognize anybody else the ability to refuse to share my positions and as you said, "it's hardly an insult" to make such comparisons. It's just an opinion.

And I love the actual MoS :D

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

I'll correct that-a Minoan figure, not Babylonian-I must have read "Minoan" and thought "Babylonian"?

I don't particularly like FF either-and I took no offense-I'm not promoting FF as a game-I think I might have played it once, and I couldn't tell you which version. and I also don't like what Disney has done to various myths. I do have to defend their artwork some, because studying drawing techniques from various Disney films has been very educational for me, as an artist. Not that it shows through all that much in bitmap sprites :)

But taken as a piece of art, I think the picture fits the topic. It doesn't shout out to me "Final Fantasy art!", and it really might not even *be* from FF-I found it accidentally online and then made an educated guess, after searching for the source of it.

And you're doing better with English than I am with any other language, so no worries!

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

The above image has really kind of grown on me-not as a replacement for Mother of Serpents, but as an interesting critter. So I've turned her into a usable Titan-sized sprite, if anyone wants to put her in the game, possibly as a Pretender. I removed her sword and just gave her another claw, for balancing purposes. I'm naming her 'Ophidian Queen' to differentiate her from Mother of Serpents:

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

The above file is a .bmp and easier to turn into a useable file, but here's a file that's viewable in this thread (the BMP should be of better quality):

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

I can't stop cracking up at this. :)

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

I give you Chalchiuhtotolin...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...iuhtotolin.jpg

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

Here's a better image, which actually has a human in a turkey suit vomiting into a pot. :D

http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/bot/ky-borb4.htm

It also goes on to explain why there's a guy in a turkey suit, but that's not important.

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

I don't think I want to see that image :)

Chalchiuhtotolin looks hung over. He should definitely show up in the game with a short range, low damage, area 1 acid attack...

Then again, he already looks like an attack of bad acid.

Please don't smite me, mighty Chalchiuhtotolin! Great God of overeating on thanksgiving!

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

After the comments, Chalchiuhtotolin is an avatar of Tezcatlipoca, and a benign one. He is not vomiting but uttering a stream of jewelled or sacred water. Maybe it could be kind of Heal Spray instead of Acid. Plus Awe, Animal Awe and Terror, the Turkey's gaze, a natural ability to collect blood slaves due to his symbolic posture as a media for man/god/man exchanges via ritual and sacred liquids : blood & water.

This one is great anyway. I want it in the game !! :p

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

I say he is praying to the Porcelain God.

Re: I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents
 

it seemed to me that he was drinking through a giant invisible bendy straw but more importantly what is that guy in the background doing with that snake? *shudder*