Image imported from derpibooru 
Alt Link (Warning: May link to something unrelated) 
Original Description:
 
Last Sunday (9th of May 2022) the current pen and paper role play game adventure came to an end so I can post the few remaining character drawings now without much fear of spoilers to anyone in the group.
 
Here we got a rather tragic NPC from the adventure our group played. Among the many diffferent variants and paths the players could pick in the round they didn’t choose any which would have let to him or his background story playing a more prominent role in the adventure itself, so he remained more of a character often refered to but rarely present in our game.  
Sir Rich Art of the the Sea is a Crystal Pony unicorn and I must admit that with the limited information on the Crystal Empire and the depiction of crystalized ponies of all kinds I had never fully realized that the very existence of unicorn (or pegasi) specimen of crystal pony kind is debateable. However in my original (prior to the current pen and paper role playing game) idea / headcanon the Crystal Empire also only ever was kind of a big city-state as we see in the series while I have adopted it a bit to the headcanon of a friend who mastered the first adventure in our group where it was established that the Crystal Empire also had a maritime side.
 
Same as with many of the previously shown characters from our adventure there is a Robin Hood alusion with his name. The name is a reference to the little known (but important) Sir Richart of the Lee from the longest medieval Robin Hood text “A gest of Robyn Hode” (that impoverished aristocrat is actually the only case in a medieval Robin Hood text which might be interpreted as a case of the later popularized theme of giving to the poor what Robin Hood took from the rich).
 
In the setting of our game Sir Rich Art of the Sea is an aged hero of older days widely recognized as one of the greatest seafearers, explorers and admirals of the Crystal navy who ever lived. He played a crucial role in the (previously mentioned) mostly naval battle of the Galloper sand during which his flag ship the “Feathered Princess” was lost, but not so much through the battle itself (during which she ran aground) but through the impact of a small meteor which was seen as a bit of an omen during the battle.  
The story about him, about Gwyn (the griffon leader who played a crucial role in uniting the Jarldoms of the Griffons to one realm) and another pony you are still going to see is a lot longer, somewhat complex and would likely result in too huge a wall of text here.
 
The result of the battle (technically the Griffons were defeated but the royal sisters still provided means to allow for face- and thereby peacekeeping on the part of the griffons so the actual outcome of the battle (in which no pony or griffon died but which still left its scars) remains a matter of debate and undoubtedly Sir Rich Art mourned the loss of his ship.  
However, what truly broke him was that he was exposed to a vision of the future (more on that will be told in another image to be uploaded) in which he saw the future downfall of the Crystal Empire, the reign of Sombra and the inevitability of those events. This horrible prospect left him very much in shambles and he spend the 27years following the battle (the time up to our adventure) living in Trottinghim where he is respected, revered even (because the ponies there know how much he did for them), but in a state of mind always very much on the edge of sanity. With his seafearing days past he turned into much of an artist sculpturing and painting. Thing about his art is that it eradiates the sentiments of the artist (him that is) to anyone approaching it. A picture he painted of Seaweed, Lightbringer (with whom he shares a deep friendship) and their foals (who he adores) painted by him gave some rather warm and pleasant sentiments.  
On the other hand anyone approaching the little memorial seen in the picture above (or here in a larger version) is likely to collapse with grief and despair.  
There is a version of the above image without reduced opacity.