HeroMachine Character Portrait Creator

Here’s my general order of operations, if it helps.

1. Wrote the posts ahead of time in Word for quick copy-pasting.

2. Copied the text for the first post into the New Topic field and hit Submit.

3. Got a weird 403 error (I think; I haven’t been able to pull it up in my browser history) about an invalid function or something.

4. Ended up retyping the last paragraph in the topic field because it was smaller than the rest of the post and deleting the pasted small text. This time when I submitted, the thread went through.

5. Edited the post to remove some HTML code that was showing up around the first and second paragraphs (the ones I hadn’t retyped). This edit went through with no issues.

6. Pasted the text for the second post from Word and got the same error page when I tried to submit.

7. Reckoned that there was some formatting weirdness with Word and moved the text over to a Notepad file and copied from there.

8. Posted the second and third posts with no issue. Each of these contained embedded image BBCode from Imgur.

9. Noticed that the text in the first post was bigger than the rest. Decided that I cared about consistency and edited the first post, re-pasting the text from Notepad.

10. At this point the first post disappeared. I also didn’t see the thread in the Art Gallery index. Panicked and decided to edit the original post text into the second post because I wanted my thread intro to be at the top before the picture posts.

11. The edited second post also disappeared. On my profile page it showed me having 0 topics and 1 posts. At this point I decided to go for broke and edited the third post too. I first edited it to say something about my posts being eaten, and that seemed to go through fine, but when I then edited it again to paste in my OP text, it too disappeared.

12. Tried making a new post in this thread, again pasting in the OP text, and got a message about having already posted that text.

13. Tried starting over and making a new thread with the same pasted OP text, which immediately got sucked into the void.

So if I had to guess, I’d say the board doesn’t like it when you re-enter text you’ve already posted, even if you’re just editing rather than posting the same thing twice. Either that or it has a grudge against Word. Although the formatting issues seem to be enough of a reason to stick to Notepad.

Actually I think that answered my question. I just need to make sure there’s enough of a content change when I edit something that the board doesn’t get mad at me and eat the post.

I’m not sure because I don’t know exactly what you did. The only time I’ve seen a thread disappear completely is when the first post has been deleted. It unteathers the thread and puts it into spam.

Mellie Greenfield – halfling wild magic sorcerer

This image was thankfully much less involved and time-consuming than the previous one, although it did present the unique challenge of building a sheep. By this point I was fairly comfortable with finding and using whatever elements would result in what I was picturing in my head, and hey if something doesn’t look quite right just cover it up with an excessive amount of foliage. I didn’t really bother with shading beyond making her light staff glowy, but I think the cutesy cartoon girl look is fine for her.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/vtWMWlA.png[/img]

Mellie is a teenaged farm girl going through magic puberty. From a young age she’s had weird magic stuff going on that nobody could really explain, although there might have been some truth to that family fable about Great-Great-Granpappy Japheth and his fling with a nymph. What was at first considered cute and funny soon became problematic, and when she was told to “just hold it in” and couldn’t, she developed an instinctive shame at her inability to control herself. She became functionally ostracized by her well-meaning but nervous community, and spent much of her time in the fields accompanied by her best friend, a sheep named Mabel.

When Mellie was 12, her parents took her to see the famous traveling wizard Ygaram the Magnificent. After the show, they waited for an autograph – but then took the opportunity to ask the wizard if he could “fix” their daughter. Able to size up the situation and feeling sympathetic toward the girl, he instead became her mentor for an afternoon and taught her to cast her first actual spells. Inspired by this encouragement, she did the best she could to learn about magic and held out hope that she might one day be able to actually use her magic constructively.

Eventually, at their wits’ end after years of dealing with her disruptive magic, Mellie’s parents decided it would be a great idea for her to go apprentice herself to Ygaram the Magnificent. They sent her out with the fan mail address on his show playbill and an escort from a cousin who ended up ditching her after being zapped by lightning. Still not quite sure where to find the wizard or whether he’d even be interested in having her as an apprentice, she ended up falling in with a group of adventurers and is currently enjoying having actual friends and doing what she can to help stop a mean ol’ dragon cult that wants to do bad things.

Tamrith – human paladin of the ancients

My second project, in which I discovered frankensteining, masking, and using little gradient bubbles to add highlights and shadows. I spent a ridiculous amount of time on this jigsaw-puzzling everything together, and then went back to it once the burnout had worn off because it really needed more details and the armor was far too pristine. And then went back to it again immediately before posting it because it always kind of bothered me that her eyes were too glam. But now she’s good to go. 😀

[img]https://i.imgur.com/iPm2qb0.png[/img]

Tamrith’s world was shaped by the ragtag mercenary group that raised her. She learned to fight, learned to do what she was told, learned to do what was necessary to survive. But no matter how much they fought, or how well, even when it seemed like some goal or other had been achieved, it was never enough. The fighting never stopped. And it was never about what they wanted or what she wanted. They were always fighting and dying for someone else’s greed, or petty squabbles, or delusions of grandeur. Even when the group was absorbed into a noble lord’s personal militia, and life became somewhat more comfortable, the fighting just never stopped.

Finally the time came when Tamrith had had enough. Weary and disillusioned, she left the militia and set out in search of a purpose that she could call her own. What she found, without even realizing its significance, was a wooden amulet left behind by a recently-deceased elderly druid she encountered while passing through a forest. From that point on, the forces of nature seemed to work their magic on and through her, leading her to eventually dedicate her sword and her shield to the cause of fighting to protect whatever good things still exist in this crappy world.

Noriel – fire genasi nomad mystic

This was my very first go at using HeroMachine when I first discovered the site. It’s pretty basic, and at the time I got the impression that the options for things like clothing were kind of limited, but that’s only because I neglected to look through all of the drop-down lists. My great breakthrough moment was when it occurred to me to use a second hair item behind her head so it didn’t look so derpy with only the flyaway bangs. 😀 I also figured out that her face would look less stupid if I resized her mouth. I did have fun with patterns, and I think the surreal-ish setting suits her tendency to connect with her surroundings on a more conceptual sensory level rather than simply through regular sight like us normies.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/MOTn5ue.png[/img]

Noriel was the result of an ill-fated romance between an elven traveler and the daughter of the powerful fire genasi who had enslaved him and his best friend during a foray to the City of Brass. After her parents were killed by the angry genasi, the child was spirited away by the surviving friend, Ianfir, who entrusted her to her elven grandparents before his grief compelled him to continue his journey through the world. When Ianfir returned two decades later, he found a grown woman in the place of the baby he had left behind.

Having received training in the mystic arts along with his friend many years before, Ianfir recognized the spark of potential in the young woman, and he took her under his wing as her mentor. They began their own sojourn through the world together, and grew closer as he carefully guided her to a fuller understanding of her mental capabilities. When he came to the troubling realization that his feelings for her had deepened beyond platonic fondness, he resorted to closing off part of his mind to her out of a belief that it was inappropriate and selfish of him to indulge in these feelings. It wasn’t until the fateful moment when he gave up his life to save hers that she realized the depth of his love for her. And then he was gone.

The mental and emotional blow of this loss nearly incapacitated her, and it would take months for her mind to process all of the ramifications of this traumatic event. She finally emerged from this waking sleep with the certainty that what Ianfir would want most for her was to go on, continue traveling and learning, and make the most of the life that he had wanted so dearly to preserve. And so she does, cautiously making her own way through a world filled with vast wonders.