Рон54
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Probably about the first ones, or maybe about both, I don't remember anymore.
The Kuthru have descriptions...
Okay, let's talk about the Kuthru. I look at them – well, it's a good unit, but I wouldn't have come up with or created something like that, because it's not my thing.
So, let's say the Kuthru doesn't exist. I find a mention of it in some bestiary, and immediately there's a problem – I'm not interested in corpse-eating monsters. My corpse-eater was originally supposed to jump; it was either the spirit of Irollan, distorted by demonic corruption after the First Sundering, or a demon trapped on Ashan and severed from Shio, but frankly, none of that matters; the visuals were what mattered.
Okay, let's say I wanted to create a Kuthru. I paint a minotaur, and what do I do with the head? I can't model, so the development would stop there forever, or I would glue together chitin from a Corvus, pieces of animals, teeth, etc.
That's not my method; I rarely glue pieces together like that.
Usually, I just take something that's already made. I can again recall my corpse-eater – I found a werewolf skull in Skyrim, but it was covered in drawings, so the whole unit with the wolf skull went into the drawer. Half a year later, I got into neural networks. Kandinsky allows you to erase parts of an image and generate something else there – I cleaned up the skull, hooray! I decided to attach it to a demon, but the demon has a wide neck, so it went into the drawer for 2 weeks. During this time, I started looking for another base for the unit and created the Crypt Lords. It's good that Pavlinho didn't help me; without him, I probably would have given the demon a mane or, more likely, a hairy neck. I was delayed with this because of the horns; I would have had to bend them differently.
So, the whole development revolved around the model, not even of the unit, but of the thing that I attached to the unit!
Added 5 minutes ago
I remembered – the horns weren't there yet at the stage of "the unit has a thick neck"; that's a later concern.
Added 11 minutes ago
Oh, now I see what you meant by the description for the Kuthru.
Added 8 minutes ago
In general, units with descriptions should be tied to some lore – local or global. For example, my dark dwarves have their own local lore, or maybe a connection to, say, the human empire. Here's an example: there's a cool warrior who hunts dragons; that's a simple basis for a description. BUT the warrior is a human – so let it be a branch of the Order of Paladins, which is dedicated to strengthening the imperial religion by destroying the dragons of other gods – cool! You can design it to match the imperial style. You can add that the order is officially recognized as heretical and the empire doesn't supply it – so let them have old armor, tattered cloaks, etc.
I usually create units without descriptions at all, unfortunately, this is not suitable for NCF.
Here's my description of the Kuthru: Mage-demon worshipers tried to infuse the soul of a demon into the body of a minotaur, and the experiments were successful. Unfortunately, most of the minotaurs were given to the dark elves by the mages, and therefore there are very few Kuthru. Later, the Kuthru broke free and settled in different wastelands of Ashan, where they hunt animals and travelers. These demons have well-developed strength and agility and fight well with axes.
