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Piscimancy — Dr. Plague
Published: 2009-05-18 05:42:27 +0000 UTC; Views: 14850; Favourites: 430; Downloads: 0
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Description
The good doctor is by far the most popular character I've ever worked with. I intend to develop him in the steampunk genre. Any ideas?Related content
Comments: 55
Dr. Plague is so cool. The skull and wings are lovely and the white rose compliments the black wings and grey suit. Is he wearing boots or is are those his actual feet? I am making a Plague doctor for my stop motion class. Overall excellent piece. 
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Thanks very much! The constraint on this design for its original application was that he could not be a human. With human-style shoes on and wings on his back like an angel, it was fairly ambiguous as to whether he was an anthropomorphized bird or just a human with wings and a mask, and my submission got kicked back. So I made the boots look like they were made for bird feet underneath and put the feathers on his arms directly. Worked out great!
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Thats excellent that it worked out in the end.
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This looks so awesome!
I wanted to and WAS going to design a character similar to this (since my name is Raven, I'm fascinated in diseases, and adore hats & steampunk fashion), but then I said,
"There are millions of artists.. Someone must've designed something like that already."
Searched through dA and bam! Here it is
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(sorry, just found this comment)
Feel free to use this design for something if you want to. I had a lot of fun researching plague doctors and creating the character, and I don't mind at all if you want to appropriate the idea or even the exact design.
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Idea Pitch:
Dr. Plague is an ambigous amoral character, charming, friendly, sinister, and cruel. He is not the villain, however, that would be Mortis. Mortis is the steampunk equivalent of Jack the Ripper, and Dr. Plague is originally tasked with the job of hunting him down and bringing him to justice. Dr. Plague goes as far as to charm young women, so that their fathers, sons, brothers, etc., aid Dr. Plague in his assignment in order to keep him away from the young ladies.
Constantly putting people in his debt, Dr. Plague is the driving force behind your story, he arrives and informs the lead charcters that something is amiss and the only way to counter this is by him calling up thier debt to him, only to fall back in debt to him once the job is finished.
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Although I haven't posted them, Dr.Plague actually has a whole bunch of cohorts- but no Jack the Ripper. Would you like to create Mortis properly and have him join the group? Unfortunately my computer is in for repair so I don't have my WIPs for the rest of the crowd but there are two men: the plague doctor, and Guy Fawkes; and two women: Catrina (Dia de los Muertos), and one who is part Bloody Mary and part Marie Antoinette. They each have a human incarnation and an animal one, or whatever combination of characteristics from each I feel like drawing at the time. The Guy Fawkes is a silver fox, the Catrina is a skeletal animal of some kind but I haven't settled on what- maybe a chupacabra?, and Mary/Marie is a headless unicorn (think about that one for a few seconds). They don't have official personal names yet. I was toying with the idea of having Mary be a sangomancer, Guy be a pyromancer, the Dr. or Catrina being a necromancer, etc.
Honestly, I just draw them. If you wanted to do the story, please be my guest. You can go wherever you want with him/them and I'll play along. I always redraw them all for Halloween, so I'll be sure to include Mortis this year. Do you know what sort of animal should go along with him?
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Mortis... should be a Jackel-like creature, but more closely resembling Set from Egyptian Mythology, than Anubis.
Catrina should be a necromancer, Guy Fawkes as a pyromancer works well, Dr. Plague can be a ferokenetic (someone with power over metal). What is a sangromancer?
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Ugh, sorry, here are the others too:
[link]
[link]
[link] Honestly, I should just replace Guy with a more original character but Halloween and Nov. 5 are almost always in the same week, and V for Vendetta has to be one of my favorite movies of all time (I'm a sociology major) so I kind of want to do -something- with that.
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Well it is Steampunk... It depends on how close you want to follow history. The Guy Fawkes Mask could be altered. Add horns and he is suddenly where the face of the devil... Turn the mask a different color would also work.
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Re: my previous message
Primitive gas masks were invented in the 1840s so there's no problem there (the original plague doctor mask was actually also kind of a primitive gas mask, although the germ theory of disease was not really applied until the mid 1800s, though we are post 1870 so we're fine using that concept) and hypodermic needles were 1844 so that works too. This would all have been rather cutting edge in the 1880s. Penicillin was discovered as an atibiotic by Pasteur in 1877. Actually, the doctor need not have had any superpowers, he could just have been rather ahead of his time in germ warfare. If we want to go with a magic free world, it would be totally do-able (minus the undead chicks, but they already seem like a separate story), a la Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes. Dynamite, nitroglycerine, and other stronger-than-black-powder explosives were also 1850s-1870s inventions for the Guy Fawkes character.
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Okay, Dr. Plague, Marie, Fawkes, Catrina, and Mortis are all cursed...
Dr. Plague failed to save the life of a preist, and instead chose to save a commoner (the man was a satanist) and was thus cursed by the Vatican to atone for this act, however he doesnt get released from the curse. He is tasked with gathering other cursed people.
Marie Antoinette was his first recruit. She was cursed after a Gypsy daughter was exicuted. The curse would keep her alive, until she made ammends, however, she doesn't know why she got cursed in the first place.
Mortis lost his soul during an alchemy experiment, he now lives as a homonculus. He was also the second recruit.
Fawkes placed a curse upon himself, he smashed the Lupin de Lumina, a magic relic that transformes him into a fox whenever he gets stressed. He is the third recruit.
Catina was reanimated by a voodoo ritual. She cannot die until her soul is released by a member of the voodoo priest's family. Catrina is the final recruit.
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It seems like we want to go in fairly different directions at this point so I think I'll just give you my blessing to go wherever you want to with this and back off a little to let you do your own thing. Feel free to develop and change the haracters open source style, and I'll be happy to illustrate anything you write (although you seem quite capable of doing it yourself). I'm a bit of a fangirl about the sociology of fictional worlds, and my requirements for them are pretty strongly academically informed, so it would be hard to be equal collaborators without having that in common. I'll try to do a better job of respecting your creative freedom and supporting your art without back-seat developing.
What benefit or compulsion is there for Dr.Plague to collect the others? Once they all get recruited, what do they do together? Is their goal to get rid of their respective curses, or are they trying to hold on to their cursed state to prolong their life/non-life? What are the effects of being cursed? It sounds like you're going for a sacred/mundane/profane sort of scheme, do the characters desire a pure/sacred state or are they more hedonistic and want to remain cursed for some pleasure or advantage?
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Well what did you have in mind for them?
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Sorry, I'm not trying to be rude by not replying, I just got a new job and still have a lot of school work.
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Do we wnat Magic Free, ruled by logic? Or a Free Range Magic almost anything goes?
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Either way, but go big or go home, no wishy-washy little bits of magic just to explain away whatever we can't be arsed with.
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I will be sending you a first draft plot synopsis soon, Im trying to work out the ending of "Birth of Conflict", which is the origin of how they all met...
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Hey thats fine, totally understand. I was just worried I had made you mad. I will work on a first draft story for the characters...
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[link] Found it! Last year's version.
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What if Dr. Plague could control animals? I know that they all have an animal form, but what if he could control the non-anthro beasts of the planet?
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Sangomancy = blood magic
How about for the good doctor (and I'm just making this up) morbimancy? As in, magic of disease. Divination about major world events by studying the body and behavior of the critically ill and dying, or maybe the magical ability to inflict and control diseases (or one specific disease?). I definitely want him to be an actual medical doctor as his primary function. Have you read Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name [link] ? <3 Worth. Only charming, so... not at all.
Mortis should be the ferokenetic, with his knives.
Their relationship could be as classic as an unrelated murderer and the forensic doctor who examines the victims, but that is a bit formulaic. Perhaps they had a working relationship (calling each other by their surnames- so Jack Mortis), with Mortis supplying the doctor with organs or whole cadavers for his practice from homeless people who died on the streets, suicides dredged from the river, or bodies that somebody needed to disappear. They perform the various autopsies and experiments together then share a pint at the local pub- friendly coworkers. Then when Mortis goes crazy, the doctor gets, not exactly morally outraged but distinctly annoyed, and goes to bring his coworker down, much the way you would drag your mate away from a drunken fight that's getting a bit too noisy. Or maybe the doctor was responsible for the change- experimentally gave Mortis a brain fever or something.
Either that or the unrelated examiner and criminal formula, only the doctor somewhat admires Mortis' work and goes to recruit him for the society or whatever to which the others belong before the police get him. Not many people would be able to get close to Mortis in a city, but if the doctor can inflict disease remotely, he could infect him without introducing himself then make him suffer for quite some time before sending him a blackmail-ish letter or some such method.
I'm just brainstorming.
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No, that is workable, I understand where you are going with it. What if Dr. Plague and Jack Mortis' powers counter eachother. "I can give people disease vs I can sure any affliction"-kinda thing....
I like the idea that they were once allies, so that could work well. What other powers (for any creation) have you considered.
What if Dr. Plague could simply teleport?
What if Mortis could walk through walls?
What if Fawkes possessed mind control? Stuff like that???
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I'm really fond of the mortimancy idea for the doctor, simply because I personally have never seen it done before and I really like the potential plot implications. I never had a good excuse for him to know Mary/Marie (maybe she is French but the Englishmen are pricks and just call her Mary, as one does) but if he has some highly desirable black magic like the ability to cure diseases for which the cure has not yet been discovered it would be completely plausible that he would have royal clients. Although I guess, being headless, illness isn't really her main problem... Have to think on that. Maybe Catrina is a colonial Mexican aristocrat visiting Spain and she and the French chick become friends. I could redesign her costume to be one of those fully gloved and veiled figures so no one would know she's a skeleton under the many layers of fabric. If she's a necromancer, she could bring Marie back to life after she was beheaded.
Steampunk style, Mortis could be made of metal or mostly metal so he is impervious to disease.
Or, if he had some kind of temperature related ability he could make his body too hot or cold for the organisms to survive. There is some mammal, I forget which one, that has made itself impervious to rabies and a bunch of other diseases by having a body temperature low enough to kill most other animals (but really it is only a few degrees difference.)
Or maybe whatever power he has is something he has to willfully hold back. If the doctor were to weaken him with disease it would make his power stronger and more destructive, not disable him.
OR, and I like this one, he could just be smart enough to wear a gas mask and some kind of leather or metal armor that a hypodermic needle couldn't pierce. I figure the doctor can control disease, but it still caused by microorganisms that have to enter the body somehow. He probably plants and suppresses diseases in anyone he thinks might be a problem later, but if they were friends either Jack knew what he had and cured it medicinally or he was trusted enough not to have been infected. That way he could have any power we want him to have.
Maybe power over smoke, soot, and ashes. Jack the Ripper's London would have been coated in soot.
Hang on, we need to figure out a time period here:
Jack the Ripper's thing was 1888
The French revolution and reign of terror was 1789-1799 (she need not be THE Marie Antoinette, but I'm sure if you're headless you get that a lot, and the Bloody Mary folklore has been around for a while, I think, as Mary Queen of Scotts was excecuted in 1541. Maybe she only appears in mirrors, or can travel through mirrors.)
Mexico got independence in 1810
-well, they're both undead, so maybe they're a bit old
Guy Fawkes died in 1606, but there have been imitators ever since so that's not a problem.
And there have been a shit ton of plagues, but the closest one to what I'm thinking was the Great Plague of London in 1665-66. Oh well, the costume is from the Black Death which was 14th century, so it's a cultural heritage at this point, there need not be an actual epidemic.
I figure then it had better be set in 1888 London, which is prime steampunk setting. Late Victorian, and contemporary with Sherlock Holmes, were he real. The absolute best part of drawing this character every Halloween for the past five years has been all the fascinating history I learn that I would never otherwise bother with.
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Ah, but you misunderstand, I have nothing but respect for history, sociology, psychology, art, etc... I was merly trying to create a reason as to why there was such a wide range of characters. Think of it as a Justice League of the steampunk world. A wide range of origins, each with similar goals. I would love to continue our brainstorming on these wonderfully macabre monsters. How did they get these abilities? What we need is a sort of World Bible as to what can and cannot be allowed.
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OKay! It won't be so perfect cause I can't make shoes but I'll do my best!! Thanks for your permission!! <3
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You're certainly welcome to work from that image, but here is also a more recent one I started but didn't quite finish that has a fully human and fully animal version of the character instead of an anthro [link]
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I'm making the Anthro one. (:
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.... I drooled in rl. 
I can't take the awesomeness of this pic!
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I'm creating a costume similar to this! beautiful!
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Would you have pictures of that costume? : D
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well so far I have a mask, top hat, and vest together. if you like I can take a few shots and put them up for you ^^. I've been looking for just the right pieces so it's taking so time. ^^ Love your work!
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Thank you. ^^ Do you suppose you can leave some comments on the ones you like?
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Awesome, good luck! I've started two other pieces with this character in a less furry style but didn't finish either of them. Still, they might be useful as inspiration [link] [link]
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thank you so much! these are beautiful lines. Would you mind if i color them for the practice? I wont upload them, unless you'd like to see the results. I'm way out of practice. But as the costume comes together I'll put pictures up. Thanks so much!
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Sure, go for it! Can't wait to see what you do with them.
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i literally stared at this for 30 minutes having thoughts about how hot this doctor is. i wouldn't mind being his patient.
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SO SO SO SO AWESOME. I'm just gonna fave this RIGHT NOW
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I absolutely love this picture. Very well done!
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It's lovely, and perfectly Steampunk enough as is (don't fall prey to the liberal addition of useless gears, however the two adorning the rose are lovely : )
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This looks great!
I love the look of his eyes...the shading...everything.
*takes that flover from him* 'for me?' O3O;
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This is amazing.And, might I add, charming as well
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