Fantasy art photos with digital manipulations. Not bad really, cut from the same cloth as Heavy Metal.

I’ve always been a fan of cheesecake fantasy artwork. Of course, that’s to be expected, as I’m pretty well the target demographic for such material. For better or for worse, images of scantily-clad sex-fantasies go hand in hand with fantasy (and, to be fair, other genres as well) and I appreciate it when such artwork is released. I suspect that it’s in that spirit that Stainless Steel Dragon released Reflections of Voldaria, a collection of fantasy-themed pictures of sexy women.

Just over a dozen pictures make up Reflections of Voldaria. I was tempted to abbreviate the title as RoV, which is the file name of the PDF of these images; I’m not sure that’s correct, however, as the storefront calls it “AoV,” which was slightly confusing. Which is it?

As I said, the pictures are released as a single PDF, which while not bad is still somewhat inconvenient if you want to manipulate these pictures in any way. Sure, you still can, but it would have been much easier if there had been a collection of individual JPG or PNG files. Still, I have to give the book credit for having full, nested bookmarks so that you can at least easily zip to each page.

The book is surprisingly forthcoming regarding the mechanics of these pictures, telling you the best way to print them out and the dimensions of the images. This is the text that you see on the book’s storefront, but it’s actually the bulk of the introduction.

The bulk of the twenty-five photos here have some sort of photo-manipulation, usually of the background. In this area, there is some slight room for improvement; while the artist clearly tried to minimize a sense of disconnect between the foreground and background images, it still comes through. The scenes feel flat in most cases, as small things that you couldn’t name but still register reinforce a sense of disconnectedness…I imagine this is due to an intrinsic understanding that we all have about how lighting and shadows should look were people actually in the areas depicted.

Each picture has a full-page lead-in, which is an entire page that gives the picture’s title and a two-stanza rhyme describing the picture. This was my biggest complaint about the book – not that the rhymes weren’t very good (though there were some real groaners), but that so much space was wasted with these intro pages. What’s here could easily have been tacked on as a caption to each image, rather than being set in the middle of a huge expanse of white space. There’s just so much more that could have been done to fill it. Personally, I would have loved to have gotten game stats in these pages, as this would have (more than) doubled the book’s practical usefulness; now you have fully-illustrated NPCs!

In regards to the subjects of the photographs, virtually all of them are beautiful women. The rare male does show up, but it’s always in conjunction with a girl, and the guy is always dressed in practical outfits. By contrast, most of the women are nearly-naked, save for the occasional girl in a chain shirt. Personally, I had no problem with this whatsoever, not only because I like sexy women, but also because I find it impossible to complain about “realism” and “verisimilitude” when most fantasy has magic and other perfectly viable explanations for why an adventurer could go around wearing almost nothing and still have a high degree of bodily protection. If you could have a magic spell that protects you as well as a full suit of armor, without the weight or maintenance that the latter requires, then why not?

Having said all of that, there are still some legitimate critiques to be made here. For one, all of the characters are clearly posing for the camera; there are no “action shots” of people engaged in adventuring. A few of these take this to an extreme example, as there’s a close-up of one woman’s face, while a different picture offers us a close-up of a girl’s thong-clad ass. Again, not a big deal, but there’s not even a pretense of this being anything other than blatant sexiness.

Overall, I enjoyed Reflections of Voldaria, but that’s because, as I noted at the beginning, I’m the sort of person who’ll forgive a lot if it means I get to look at sexy, scantily-clad girls. If examined in a technical sense, there is a lot of merit here – the photographs are fairly professional in the sense of the shots conveying what they’re meant to. It’s when you move beyond the technical aspects of the actual photographs of the girls that we see the need for improvement. From the photoshopping to the lack of image files to the huge tracts of white space, there’s more that could have been done in how these images were packaged.

Still, if you’d like to reflect on some lovely ladies, you could do much worse than to check out the Reflections of Voldaria.

This is a fun and tasteful presentation of 'classic' fantasy artwork, provided you do not expect female adventurers to sally forth in appropriate clothing! It's a delightful series of posed photos of ladies blended with fantasy imagery - castles, creatures, wild country - and generally brandishing assorted weaponry.

There are occasional technical defects in edge blending of superimposed images; but I really only have 2 gripes. Firstly, I don't know about anyone else, but I wouldn't go adventuring dressed like that and, secondly, where are all the tasty male adventurers?

At least the lady in the image titled 'Thou Shall Not Pass' has a decent chain shirt, but even she would be advised to wear a suitable padded arming coat underneath it.

You might not want your grannie or the vicar to catch you with this, but it is nicely-presented and would only offend those who seek to be offended; if you admire the female form and like fantasy subjects, enjoy!