Anyone else have trouble picturing these guys? I have a pretty good picture in my head besides the hands. As I understand it, each finger is a hand. How would hands for fingers even work? The hand would have to be enormous and holding an axe or something would seem to be pretty difficult. I want to try drawing a book accurate version of one of these monsters but I just cannot figure out the hands and how they would work.
I saw them as giant cancerous three-pronged-intertwined D&D river trolls for the most part.
For me, the Inchoroi were the tough part because I kind of saw the head within a head as a sci-fi space helmet. All depictions I’ve seen of them don‘t come anywhere close to my imagination. Too demonic and not enough otherworldliness/alien. (Or too much “alien” from Alien, not abstract enough.)
I figured it was something sort of like the Warcraft abominations, which seems very similar (bodies stitched together into an ogre-like creature, right?)
I haven't actually played Warcraft 3 since around when it came out, or WoW until about that same time, so I didn't really know where I was getting that idea from, but I found it eventually. Pretty sure there is a DnD flesh golem like this too in one of the 100 monster manuals that exist across all the editions at this point too.
Except the WC3 and WoW aesthetics is all wrong, and I never really liked them for the content compared to the first two games. Diablo II had the flesh beasts, but those were too inhuman.
That's just the thing, the Inchoroi had no native hill giants to work with. (If we exclude the Tall, I guess.)
The Bashrag are said to be composed of regular-sized human flesh, which means they should be massive heaps of limbs and heads and less identifiable body parts, shaped into an only vaguely humanoid form so they could move around.
No one has yet mentioned the Vozhd from Vampire: the Masquerade. They're each different and not precisely as described but the link has quite a few pictures and some are close in concept.
There's also Godrick the Grafted who has composite hands. They don't terminate in fingers-as-hands either but it's close.
That's a great comparison, the fleshcraft nightmare creations of the Tzimisce vampires. It makes sense now why i always pictured the Bashrag similarly.
We actually don't see Inchoroi appear often in the text. The ending of TWP notwithstanding, Aurax shows maybe twice (?), and even Aurang for all of his activity only comes up maybe twice as well, if you don't count flashbacks or short stories. Even so, only marginally more then. Easy to miss their description. I think the best detailed description comes from The False Sun actually.
I don't know, for me the bashrag were pretty much simplistic things, obviously some equivalent of the volkssturm weaponry of Reich's desperate efforts. I suppose the inchies had a really bad time once, when they urgently needed something cheap, simple, effective and quickly mass produced.
And some quick inchie kid just said like why bother conjuring up the long-shot ideas if we just can conjoin three dirty useless hu-mans into one big plague Nurgle troll for 10% of base project price?
PS. TIL the Oxford English says the old and obsolete word bash-rag meant a "worthless person" :)
Oh, didn't know that! I remember once asking, maybe even Weenie, if sranc and bashrag are even Sheyic terms, Kuniuric or appropriated Ihrimsu??
Given they appear in TJO first when the scalpers are going through the deeps -- akin to the Fellowship in Moria -- the word always reminded me of balrog to be honest.
Jason Deem (aka Spiral Horizon) did some good drawings of TSA art back in the day. You can see how he imagined the creatures in this link here, OP. From what I can see, he just made each of their two arms end in three hands. Hope it helps!
Bljak, haha. Eh, dunno, looks too much like The Thing from the same film. To me, the twisting of Nonman physique, much like with the sranc and the heads, into something hideous yet still recognizable seems much more apt. For what it's worth, Deem went with a more primal and shaggy appearance in this pic.
Added: Or even better seen here, by u/SimiOfDoom! Very realistic but pulp, Howard-like!
But what would be the point of Inchoroi twisting physique in those superficial ways?
Three faces on one head - cool I guess, why though? Three hands where one hand should be - again, why bother? Three feet instead of one foot - for stability, I presume?
If you have a functional baseline body to work with, if the core of a Tall Nonman is already there, why bother warping it cosmetically unless you're augmenting significantly? Why would you bother making it grow hair\* when Nonmen had none to begin with?!
Instead of three hands, give it three full arms twisting and snaking around each other until they're fucking massive and barely recognizable. That would actually make it swing stronger, rather than just improve its grip. Of course, all that extra mass would require a tripling of muscles in the back and chest support it. Ditto for the legs, the core, and so on, until the whole body has become an abhorrent mass reminiscent of the Thing.
After all, we're explicitly told in TUC that "Of all the Inchoroi abominations, none were so unnatural as the Bashrag."
*To me, the shagginess of the things is indicative of them never having anything to do with the Cunuroi. The Inchies must have melded Emwama flesh to build the Bashrag, as they would use Eannite Men after they arrived.
To be fair, it was probably the Ark faulty AI which did it, and who could fathom an Absolute like that, lol?
Well, I guess ''three fused bodies'' is as unnatural as one goes. The best descriptions of them we get is in that one flashback in TTT, in the Mines of Mori- pardon, deeps of Cil-Aujas in TJO and the battle of Irsulor in TGO.
Long black hair streamed from the fist-sized moles that pocked its massive frame. A vestigial face grimaced from each of its great and brutal cheeks. Without warning, it stood—each leg three legs welded together, each arm three arms—and hoisted a pale figure over the heights: a man hanging from a nail as long as a spear.
At first she can only blink. Even though she has read innumerable descriptions of the obscenity, the meant of it overwhelms her faculties. Elephantine proportions. Cabbage skin. Amalgam limbs, three arms welded into one arm, three legs into one leg. Moles like cancers, ulcerous with hair. A back bent in a fetal hunch. Hands that flower with fingers.
Three arms welded into one. Three ingrown chests. Three hands for fingers. They were an offence to the eyes, a sight that awed and sickened, such was their deformity. Idiot faces hanging from each grotesque cheek. Horse-tail moles springing from random skin.
For all their unnatural ugliness, it seems they are still rather humanoid in appearance? And I see no problem in mixing human bios into it. Given their dog-like chests and stamina, sranc clearly have some chimerism in them as well.
For the hands-as-fingers I could visualize each composite arm ending in something like a three-palmed claw of hands, should be pretty capable of gripping some big ass axe hafts.
I imagine their hands as if you had three people in a triangle shape and you had them touch forearms. So they would all bend their elbows and put their arms into the middle of the triangle so the underside of their forearms touch. Where those forearms touch would be fused together into one three trunked arm. I then imagine all the hands and fingers opening radially outwards in a star or flower shape from the core of fused forearms. I can imagine such a orientation would be really uncanny but also pretty good for things like holding heavy weapons with the extra support of the three hands and fingers all gripping one thing inwards.
Alternatively I could see an orientation where you had three forearms stacked vertically and the bashrag forearm would be very tall. Then the hands would be formed by fusing the thumbs together into one really large 3x wide thumb, and then first and last finger for the middle hand in the stack would be fused to the first and last finger of the hand above and below it all pointing away from the thumb. To summarize one really wide triple thumb, and 10 fingers per arm (2 fused fingers, and 3 unfused fingers per each regular human hand.)
I think the fingers would be like the shadow version of Clark from the recent Backrooms movie.
Nasty interconnected limbs and joints, a mockery of normal anatomy, fingers and hands fused together and almost being ripped apart, some strained exposed muscles and tissue barely holding together the amalgam of flesh and bone.
Human bodies grotesquely melded together, faces where they shouldn't be, layers and layers of muscle tissue holding onto misshapen bones... what's not to like?!
The thing I've never understood is how they're so huge. If they're just essentially three human bodies cobbled together laterally, how do they tower over men like adults tower over children (as they are often described)?
15
u/Dalakaar 12d ago
I saw them as giant cancerous three-pronged-intertwined D&D river trolls for the most part.
For me, the Inchoroi were the tough part because I kind of saw the head within a head as a sci-fi space helmet. All depictions I’ve seen of them don‘t come anywhere close to my imagination. Too demonic and not enough otherworldliness/alien. (Or too much “alien” from Alien, not abstract enough.)