Sunday 1 June 2014

Dervishes of Tishtrya IV (painted)

The first painted experiment of my Afghan Sufi Dervishes I wrote aboute last month. Foundry Baluchis, a Grenadier Powered armour suit and an Artizan Moor in flak armour with an old Lascannon.
I imagine the dervishes have a forcefield device somewhere hidden in their robes, allowing them to use traditional close combat weapons without being mowed down by miniguns and lasers.

The desert planet they are operating from is Tishtrya IV (being Sirius in old Persian).
I'm trying to avoid Dune derived crypto islamism, although of course Dune is a huge influence. My knowledge about sufism and islamic tradition though, is less than superficial at the moment and I'm aware this whole project is borderline orientalism. But now I'm obsessed by this idea and its about time far future space opera gets beyond white anglo saxon grim-dark or Atreides savior of the natives. But Abdul Goldberg might show up.

3 comments:

Mr Papafakis said...

I like the dude holding up the heavy bolter.

I think one of the main reasons that we are stuck with a lot of these stereotypical warriors, is due to the writers of these books being from Anglo-saxon backgrounds.

We will never see anything else of much diversity until peoples from other ethnicities begin to create games from their own point of view.

I'm not saying that they don't do it. But if they have or do, it hasn't become mainstream.....it's still very niche.

Keep up the good work :)

phreedh said...

Nice job on those! And I really like the vaporators in the back, don't think I commented on those. Must feel great to get those out of your system.

area23 said...

It's true what you say, the One. I discovered there are some arabic SF writers though. Probably impossible to get in any language I speak. :)
But then, at the moment this is more like Back of Beyond in space meets starwars (-without aliens).

To finally do somehing with years old trash ìs a great satisfacion indeed, Phreedh.