Return of Reckoning ~ Custom Capes

Recently a new artist decided to give his time and skills to help increase the pool of assets for Return of Reckoning – new for RoR, but not new for Hypothetical War. For many years I have been grateful to ArchExecutor for his continued help giving my crazy ideas a depiction, but now the Warhammer Online community will also benefit from his talents. Return of Reckoning is a project that is built and grows based on volunteers, and we are always looking for more artistic talent! Due to our current limitations, we can work on retexturing existing texture files, or introducing static models. What we cannot do – which I know many of us long for – is introduce/retexture armor pieces. Hopefully one day we will get the tools for this, but as of now our ‘armor’ updates are limited to capes. Below you can find some of our custom capes that have already been released, with a few more in the pipeline!

The first capes drawn up by ArchExecutor were the Keg End capes. In our discussion regarding the design we felt that the Order cape should reflect the dwarfen nature of the holiday, with subtle nods to the Empire where Bugman’s Brewery was located. The phrase at the bottom of the cape, Justice Through Vengeance, is very much a reference to the destruction of Bugman’s Brewery. It is incredibly hard to draw a single cape that works for all 3 races in a faction, so some races look less than ideal wearing their capes (such as the High Elves wearing the Keg End cape). The Destruction Keg End cape had a looser theme associated with it, as Keg End tends to be about ogres and giants crashing the dwarfen festivities, so our Destruction variant was a bit of a generic ‘raider’ cape which took on a Dark Elf vibe while using the RoR logo. These capes had the added benefit of being dyeable.

The next capes that were long on our list to update were the Bloodlord capes, which had placeholders used before. The Chosen/Marauder cape was slated for replacement because the cape that was used is intended for another use. The Greenskins were using a single appearance, which broke the general rule of two capes per race, and additionally the appearance they had was a generic fur cloak which did not seem all that rewarding. The High Elves likewise had a single appearance so it was decided that the Archmage and Shadow Warrior should get a new appearance due to the fact that the prior cape worked the least well with those two classes. These capes got some additional love and care, as they were made to work with dyes. The capes were designed to work as well as possible with the Bloodlord armor sets. We had planned to remake some other Bloodlord capes, but these plans are on hold as we pursue other projects.

The most recent capes added were for the Night of Murder live event. This live event is focused on Khaine and the druchii wanton bloodshed. The imagery we decided to go for was a single image of Isha kneeling in a pool – for Destruction this was a pool of blood (and her hair and knees also were stained with the blood), while for Order it was a pool of tears. The color palettes of each cape were intended to work for the respective faction – with an emphasis on the elves. We understood that this cape would not look great on an orc or a dwarf, but as I mentioned above, it is hard to make a cape that is universal for all races.

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