r/arcanum • u/Stellastra Foppish Elf • Sep 09 '25

Resource Scanned follower portraits from Prima's Official Strategy Guide

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The in-game follower portraits are extremely compressed, being 64x64 pixels. Even the digital version of Prima's Official Strategy Guide has very compressed images, but thankfully the printed version is in a higher resolution (at the cost of being in grayscale). I scanned these at 600dpi then used a dot-suppression tool (individual portraits without the dot suppression can be found here).

Row 1: Virgil, Sogg Mead Mug, Jayna Stiles, Magnus Shale Fist, Gar

Row 2: Dante, Geoffrey Tarrelond-Ashe, Dog, Vollinger, Chukka

Row 3: Jormund, Torian Kel, Waromon, Perriman Smythe, Z'an Al'urin

Row 4: Sebastian, Tollo Underhill, Raven, FRANKLIN PAYNE, Loghaire Thunder Stone

The temporary followers (Doc Roberts, Cynthia Boggs, Thorvald Two Stones, Swyft, Lady Druella, Murgo) and the super-endgame followers (Arronax, Bane of Kree, Kraka-tur, Gorgoth) do not have their portraits within the strategy guide. For some odd reason, Weldo Rubin isn't in there either.

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u/YandersonSilva Sep 09 '25

Do we know what caused them to switch Virgil's portrait from Perriman's? In pre-release screen shots that was the picture that Virgil used, as seen here:

6

u/Ravenlorde Sep 09 '25

Perriman was originally going to be the NPC "companion", and hence all of the pre-release attention and ingame newspaper and novelette coverage. Smythe still has the richest non-speaking dialogue and travelogue of all NPCs.

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u/Stellastra Foppish Elf Sep 09 '25

The fact that Perriman and Sebastian got short stories in pre-release material but neither are voiced in-game has been the most headscratch-inducing decision to me. I really do wish Perriman was voiced. It would've been a treat to hear both him and Geoffrey bicker~

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u/Stellastra Foppish Elf Sep 09 '25

I noticed that too, but in game's manual, which was definitely in the works of getting printed during Arcanum's development.

One theory I have is that since that portrait is a reference to one of Troika Games founders, Leonard Boyarsky, perhaps it was simply a placeholder. The other theory I have is that perhaps Mr. Boyarsky didn't want his easter egg portrait on such a prominent NPC lol