Behold! Qualos – guardian of the Duck Temple. This is an official RuneQuest miniature produced by Infinity-Engine. Whether you use miniatures in your games or not, it's hard to deny that this one is pretty amazing.
Behold! Qualos – guardian of the Duck Temple. This is an official RuneQuest miniature produced by Infinity-Engine. Whether you use miniatures in your games or not, it's hard to deny that this one is pretty amazing.
Am I oafish to point out the Harryhausen tribute here?
ReplyDeleteIt is never oafish to mention Harryhausen.
DeleteNah, saved me having to do it. :)
DeleteGreat looking sculpt there. Bit niche, but that's true of most RQ-specific sculpts. About the only stuff that get much use in other settings are broo and scorpion man minis - and Warhammer beastmen used to show up in RQ collections as broo, especially in the early days when their chaos mutant stuff was way more varied and not relatively uniform goatmen.
Although I have seen Ghost Archipelago crews composed entirely of duck minis. That boxed set Mongoose did was really nice, and IIRC Rebel Minis is selling them these days. They picked up a ton of ex-Mongoose molds and masters, including the metal stuff from Starship Troopers.
Step 1: it's a duck. Step 2: it's a tribute to the beloved Ray Harryhausen. Step 3: ? Step 4: Profit!
DeleteI really love Harryhausen. And the older I get, the more respect I seem to get for the lost art-form of 'stop-motion-animation'. I took a quick look at the website linked in the article, and at first glance this piece [1] especially looks like it could have starred in any of Harryhausen's work.
Delete[1]
https://www.infinity-engine.com/index.php?id_product=161&controller=product
Marvelous
ReplyDeleteNever has "Duck!" been a more appropriate warning.
ReplyDeleteAmazing!
ReplyDeleteA fracking duck ? You've got to be freaking kidding me !
ReplyDeletelol.
Hrm. Now that I thought about it some more, the concept of a 'Duck Temple' shouldn't sound as silly (although according to what I think I have read on this blog about 'RuneQuest' it surely was intended as such ? ) as I originally thought it was: In ancient Egypt, we basically had 'cat worship'. Oh, well.
DeleteAn even more apt comparison than the Egyptian worship of the cat-headed Baset (whom the syncretic Greeks adopted as Ailuros) might be the ibis-headed god Thoth. The ibis is a wading bird, not a swimming waterfowl like ducks, but it fills the same general ecological space and wild ibis and wild ducks have roughly the same interactions with mankind. As far as I know, no human civilization has ever domesticated ibis, whereas domesticated ducks are found across most continents.
DeleteGiven that many human cultures have deified or sanctified domesticated animals to one degree or another (cows, bulls, and horses seem to me to be the most common; but there are plenty of others) it seems quite plausible that a human culture could have some sort of mythological “duck god,” even outside of RuneQuest’s intentional tongue-in-cheek use of heroic warrior ducks as PCs.
(It doesn’t seem too implausible to me that a fantastic civilization could have domesticated ibis. Certainly we’ve all seen weirder critters kept as domesticated animals in various fantasy settings!)
Thank you for that post. I honestly never thought about it like that, or knew about it. But perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised, since the Egyptian god 'Khonsu' (which I only really know from comic books in Marvel's 'Moon Knight' stories) has a 'falcon' version; another worshiped bird form. Thanks again.
DeleteIt seems a pretty universal part of human societies worldwide to think there has to be some sort of supernatural something or other about birds. I mean, everywhere we have travelled as a species ever since we left Africa all those millennia ago, wherever we went there were the birds. We were Down Here and they were Up There. No matter how advanced we became, even with our fancy technology like Fire, the Inclined Plane, or Agriculture, we remained stuck Down Here… and they were effortlessly Up There.
DeleteSo, yeah, makes sense to me that a lot of real world civilizations have bird gods or at least some sort of bird-as-messenger-of-the-gods as part of their mythology. I mean, really, what is the Angel? It’s a man with bird wings glued to his back! Hardly all that different than a man with a bird head, if you take a step back and look at it from afar.
So, sure, a duck temple. Makes sense.
But is it a temple to Humakt or to Orlanth???
ReplyDeleteThat homage quacks me up!
ReplyDelete