More art for Run Faster on the CGL Tumbler and figured better say it before Stahlseele does

I'd hire the one on the left to round up the herd on the ranges.

I thought Shadowrun centaurs had horse heads, human torsos/arms, and horse below the waist?

Has that been changed, is this a centaur with some major bodymods, or an orc with some major bodymods?

This is now a bit of a debate as the projected cover for Run Faster is shown here also with what looks like a metahuman headed-centaur.

Is this just art or the new design for centaurs? Until the book comes out, we can not be sure.

They were (mostly) human-headed in 4E, so it's not exactly new.



So they have human heads and faces, but with somewhat elongated features. The art cited here could maybe use a bit more emphasis on the elongation, but I wouldn't sweat it given the nature of variation of distinguishing traits between individuals.

~Umi

But pg 82 of the Runner's Companion and pg 42 in Running Wild has images of the Centaur with a distinctly equine head and this is probably what many folk saw as being the standard in 4E so you can understand their confusion at the change.
Edit:
So the art team and description guys had a bit of a break in communication back then.

I agree the description could match closer the new art with just a bit of tweaking in the drawing.


Hmmmm... Pony Poseur Quality..... For Centaurs wanting a more equine look in the face.....sometime called a 'Mr Ed'....

It actually goes back to Paranormal Animals of Europe, where it says the head and some other features make it look vaguely equine (i.e., the head is one of the more equine features). For reasons unknown, RC reformulated that to "the head looks vaguely equine", but the artwork continued to show horse heads. Now the horse heads have entirely gone, for no reason I can think of...assuming it was intentional.

Soooo.. something like Klingon Foreheads but in reverse?

If we're lucky we might get that much of an explanation...


But really, why?

I chalk this up to poor quality control regarding the art in these books.

I mean, just immediately before that Runner's Companion image are a couple of absolutely awful depictions of various Infected on pages 78 and 81. All around, the art in RC is pretty terrible.

And while Running Wild in general has much, much higher quality artwork, it still has the occasional problem with inaccuracies in the material, even if the art itself is well rendered.

~Umi

What makes you so sure it was the artist who dropped the ball, and not the writer who misunderstood the description in Paranormals of Europe?

We have a clear disconnect between the textual description and the artwork (unlike the other critters and metavariants), but which of the two took the wrong turn is hard to say...

I did not realize it was a fistbump at first and thought they were holding hands.




-k

Well firstly, I don't exactly have Paranormals of Europe to compare the descriptions.

Secondly, as I already said, the artwork in Runner's Companion is pretty universally terrible, while Running Wild has a lot of inaccuracies of details in its art.

And thirdly, the wording of the descriptions between RC and RW is incredibly uniform, which suggests it is accurate while the art is not.

~Umi

That happens all the time. Tell an artist to draw a centaur and that is what he comes up with.

Reminds me of the Aslan in Traveller. The description says "humanoid with features resembling lions" and the newest art makes them full anthro lions. Except there the older art got it right...

Was never big fan of horse headed version. More human face definetly makes it easier to interact with and be less alienated by more common races. AKA more PC accessible.

The namely, page 26:
The centaur's lower torso is biologically comparable to that of a large horse, and the upper, forward torso resembles that of a primate. It stands approximately 1.8 meters from ground to shoulder, weighing an average of 300 kilograms. The centaur moves on four legs, and uses a pair of powerfully muscled arms ending in three-fingered hands with an opposable thumb to perform more complex tasks. The enlarged and elongated upper vertebrae and nech, and the skull and head of the creature make it look vaguely equine, but it displays a larger frontal cortex than other horses. A thick mane covers the head and occasionally the neck. The centaur has 36 teeth, including strong incisors and well-developed canine teeth.

The image is the one seen in this article.



Well, the art is also uniform, even between all three sources (though the omnivore teeth were seemingly scaled back), and unlike the text it was done that way several times and not just copied. Also, you seem to be a bit mum on the textual discrepancies of RC...zombie plague, anyone?

Wait... PAoE also uses the exact phrase "vaguely equine". And the image linked looks -far- more like a human head than a horse head.

In what way? The image above is clearly more humanoid than equine in terms of the head, but the later RC and RW images are incontestibly horse-headed.

I was assuming PAoE actually undermined my position as an earlier edition work, but from everything you've just shown me it actually supports my viewpoint that centaurs are supposed to have humanoid heads - yes, "vaguely equine" ones, but still chiefly human - and the RC and RW images are simply inaccurate.

~Umi

But not in the same relation, as I stated before...

PAoE names the head as a contributing factor to the equine look, contrasting it with the again non-equine brain. Essentially, the text says "it has a primate torso, but with the head and everything it looks vaguely like a horse again".


Humanoid? It has some features discerning it from a regular horse, notably the canines, and the angle between the forehead and snout looks a bit different from what I imagine a horse. But humanoid? If anything, one could say the snout looks a bit wolf-ish..