Still being drawn. The art, the traits and the rarity all keep moving. Nothing you are looking at is the final collection.
The classes
Every token is somebody, and there are seventy-two somebodies. None of them is from a world. Each one is a thing the artist tried to draw and did not manage, and what you are looking at is the evidence of how it went.
The drawing beside each one is real: it is that class rolled on a fixed number, drawn at you now. Click it to open it in the Lab.
46 of them
Forty-six attempts at a person. Most of the collection is in here.
The first thing anybody draws, and the first thing anybody abandons.
Two dots, a line, a circle round it. It is in the margin because it was drawn next to something else that mattered more at the time, and the something else is not in the book any more.
A person, if you stop looking at the nose.
The snout was an accident. It came out too long, and rather than start again the artist leaned into it, added the ears, and moved on. Half the collection is decisions made this way.
Drawn by somebody who has seen a dog.
Four legs is a lot of legs when you have not planned. This one has the right number and none of them are the same length. It is grinning about it.
Wide, because the page was.
The first line went too far left, so the second had to go too far right, and by the time there was a mouth the whole head was a frog. Nobody drew a frog on purpose.
One eye, because two never matched.
You can see the second one under the paper: a faint ring, rubbed out. The single eye is the most carefully drawn thing on the page and it took four attempts to get there.
Every lump is a place the pen stopped to think.
A face drawn slowly by somebody who was not enjoying it. The bumps are hesitation marks that were later joined up and called a decision.
Drawn on two pages and taped together wrong.
The halves do not line up and the tape has yellowed. Somebody has drawn stitches over the seam to make it look deliberate, which almost works from a distance.
A head is easier if it is a vegetable.
No jaw to get wrong, no cheekbones to place, no ears. Cut the face straight into the front of it and there is nothing left to be bad at.
Somebody wanted stone and could only do lumps.
The moss came later, scribbled into the gaps between the lumps to hide how few of them are actually shaped like anything. It is the moss that makes it read as stone.
19 of them
Nineteen animals, each of which locks its whole build rather than decorating a human one.
It sat on the page and would not move.
Drawn from life, badly, at speed, because the subject was leaving. The ears are the only part anybody got in time.
Shoulders first, then no room left for a head.
The frame came out enormous and the skull had to be squeezed in above it. It is the widest thing in the book and everything it wears was cut for somebody narrower.
A horse is a dog with the face pulled out.
That is genuinely how this one was drawn, and it is why the eyes are where a dog’s eyes are. It has never once been mistaken for a horse.
All eyes. There was no plan for the rest.
Two enormous discs went down first and took up most of the head. The tufts were added afterwards to give the shape somewhere to end.
The antlers took longer than everything else combined.
Branch after branch, each one a little less certain than the last, until they ran out of page. The face beneath them was finished in under a minute.
Drawn in one colour because that is all a crow is.
No shading, no highlight, nothing to get wrong. The beak is the only line that had to be right and it took three goes.
A small face with the ears of something much larger.
The ears were drawn first, at the size the artist thought a bat’s ears were, and the head had to shrink to fit under them.
Permanently unfinished, and pleased about it.
The one creature in the world that stays a larva, drawn in a book of things that stay unfinished. Somebody in the margin has written "same".
It came to the lamp while the drawing was being done.
It is on the page because it landed on the page. The wings are traced round the actual insect and the body was filled in from memory afterwards.
7 of them
Seven gods and one diver. Every one of them is worse at being a god than a real drawing of a god would be, which is the point.
The bolt is outlined and was never filled in.
A god of the storm holding an empty shape where the lightning should be. The beard is drawn as cloud, because the artist could not do hair and could do weather.
A crown drawn on somebody who is mostly gone.
The regalia is complete: crown, collar, the lot. What is inside it thins out towards the bottom of the page until there is nothing holding any of it up.
Blindfolded, which saved drawing the eyes.
It is looking somewhere the page does not go. The cloth over the face is drawn with more attention than any pair of eyes in this book has ever received.
Hair was the problem, so every strand became a snake.
A snake is a line with a head on it and hair is a thousand lines that all have to agree. This was not a mythological decision, it was a practical one.
Half the rays are proper rays and half are tick marks.
It starts well at the top of the halo and by the bottom it is just dashes. You can see the exact ray where somebody decided this was going to take too long.
Drawn at night, by the light of the thing on its head.
Pale, soft, slightly wrong in the proportions, the way things drawn late are. The crescent is the only part with a hard edge on it.
A helmet, so that no face was needed at all.
Brass, bolted, and completely closed. The glass has something behind it and the artist declined to say what, which is the most efficient solution in the whole book.