The presentation of the rules is very cool.. lots of space devoted to art and stories. I'm treating this project as an exploration and haven't done my usual research on the game. The plan is to treat it as a story and just see how it unfolds... learning the game and the lore as we go.
The group of four survivors is very elegant. Simple designs with great lines and character. Toward the end of painting this group I realized that the rock each of them are holding (The Founding Stone) is actually a fragment of, what appears to be, a floor of stone faces.
The shrouds remind me of funerary shrouds and, so far, the game seems to be a survival action RPG set in Purgatory... that is just a guess but I decided to treat the clothing as coarse linen shrouds.
Each starting survivor has the bit of cloth, a Founding Stone, and a Lantern. The Lantern seems to be a big deal, and a major theme throughout the game, which further leads me to suspect the setting to be Purgatory.
We'll see soon enough... I may be completely wrong but its a great new adventure!
The White Lion is the adversary for the first encounter. Even though this White Lion isn't anatomically a terrestrial lion I took some advice and had a look at some photos and paintings of actual lions before painting. It was a great idea and reminded me to include some details about the face markings, nose shape and color, and maine colors etc...
This lead to one of the first challenges... Lions tend to have a white mask, almost beard shaped, which I really wanted to include. The trick was I also wanted the lion to be "white" as its name implied. I went with the Menoth White Base (P3) for the main body and face (spot shaded with Seraphim Sepia (GW)) and Splintered Bone (Reaper) for the mask.
The shark-like teeth were and oddly hand-like paws underscores that this is not only a powerful predator... but an actual, and quite unnatural, monster!
Anyway... I'm off to set-up for the game!
I'll let you know how it turns out.