Continuing my look at the four launch heroes for the Precinct Omega Kickstarter, we're turning our attention, this week, to Corporal Artur Kurtz.
Kurtz was a stepper, like Abdalla. But after he was seriously injured, losing his left arm, he semi-retired into a job training and mentoring aspiring steppers. Steppers build and maintain their own suits and vehicles for the hazardous surface journeys, and Kurtz was the master of hasty-but-effective patches that would save lives - a fact attested to by the fact that it was only his arm that he lost. It was at Abdalla's urging that he joined the rescue mission to Earth, and when Abdalla was given command of Bal Anub, her first pick for the team's sapper was her old friend.
Kurtz's concept art echoed many of the features first established in Abdalla's, but reflected the engineer's less adaptive mindset.
Adam did an amazing job of making Kurtz the very epitome of the word "gruff", and we decided to add scars to his left cheek at the same time, drawing further inspiration from David's artwork - perhaps another reminder of the accident that lost him his arm.
Speaking of his arm, the prosthesis is a nod to Kurtz's other role, thematically, as the team's drone pilot, suggesting that he is closer to a machine than his comrades. Kurtz's design was also intended to be a flexible one. Although he is very much the archetypal "generic veteran", his prominent satchel allows him to be easily articulated as a medic, courier, combat engineer or quartermaster.