Tuesday 21 May 2013

Horror People Asked For

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Requests served like vegemite icecream.

This guy. Tom Fitzgerald asked about a Gorgonopsia. Well they are pretty hard to make any more monstrous  They are basically like a pitbull/lizard/hyena cross. If you want something like a dragon but bestial and mythologically disposable ,  look to these guys. This one here is a Lurking Pulverine. Which means it is surprisingly stealthy and if you look at it and fail a save, you then believe you haven't seen it and rationalize away any evidence of its existence.

Sanctious Lope-Lope

 Patrick Stewart asked about Pituriaspida (and/or one of the Ostracoderms) . (basically really early proto fish which were a helmet with a tail) Which I had surprising trouble drawing (because they already look interesting but not in a dynamic way). Anyway the above and below are the ones I liked the best. The above is avenging angel of a dead long forgotten subterranean God. It fliess and shoots freezy beams.
The below (a glooming) is something that swims around the astral plane and makes fate tunnels when jumps out of the astral plane (to elude predators). A fate tunnel is a zone that can contaminate people spending too much time there, linking them to each other, so coincidence will conspire to intertwine their lives together.
Glooming
 "You are bound together.... by FATE"
"but why? for what great cause"
"Astral Fish Escape Witness"
"So.. for no reason then" -Patrick Stuart

Krytox! and SnickHound
 Krytox! is obviously an transplanar bounty hunter and his dog. (Request from Joey Lindsey).
Krytox! is far far far too old for this shit. He was too old for this shit when the gods were an itch in the loins of a Titan. He is a battered, jaded , and inexorable veteran, relentlessly plodding away at a vocation he loathes, out of sheer bloody mindedness.
Squelch 
 Reynaldo Mandrinan  said I should do something called a Squelch. Which is obviously a hagfish hag. Empowered by squalid magics (even by hag standards) it can secrete enough mucus to form a powerful external body , like an exoskeleton of necrotic fluid. They are given to periods of chronic catatonia and hibernation and their lairs can be mistaken for being abandoned and therefore safe, until the Squelch , rubber-boned emerges from a small, over-looked box in an attic or closet to restate her claim.




 These are the giant amphibians that ruled the earth before dinosaurs. The immediate monster appeal is from the ones that were like crocodiles but with even bigger mouths, and the ones with a disturbing human looking yet  quadrupedal gait. The big mouthed ones are for making swamps and gladiatorial pits worse and should be given names like Guzzler, Miremaw , Globber-whole, and Hellmouth.  Their character should combine the manic depressive energy of the crocodile and the gross physical proportioning of a toad. A fist with a mouth.
The weird human walking ones should be a cross between Old Ones of Innsmouth and Fey, with certain nights in which they roam and baby swapping and odd offerings hung from trees. The "Cousins".
(reference picture by someone else)

The Eye Phantasmagoric
Mike Evans asked for this. It a giant floating eye , the only part existing in this plane of some godling voyeur. A bug torturing child on a cosmic scale. Attracted to Summonings.   Sometimes it just observes. Other times it makes something to observe.   The baneful magics it inflicts on you are actually just the effects of the godling thinking of you. Its ideas of you are realer than you are.
Gobbledegook

and he asked for this. It is a Gobbledegook. Which of course climbs down your chimney, eats half of your children , and ties your arms and legs together. Its form suggests not something originally human, but something mimicking human form in an alien and obscene caricature. Unfathomably malign. 



Here is some reference pictures I am including because I don't think I did them justice.








7 comments:

  1. Thank you, Your Highness. The things are beautiful. The effect associated with the Pulverine is called Panzaism according to my Chaosium-based psychiatric knowledge.

    There is something so primordially robust about Labyrinthodont skulls, like they are bone elementals with flabby toad bits.

    Sometimes it's lonesome on blogger when G+ is full of the hubbub and the excitement but I feel cheap and trendy commenting over there sometimes.

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    Replies
    1. am so pleased that there is a word for that!
      Yes I miss the bounty of comments that a fresh post would bring. A conversation is so much easier via g+ , but it brightens my day to see comments directly on the blog.
      I forgot to mention how Labyrinthodont means "maze tooth". Which is an entirely new and different source of inspiration.

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  2. The illustrations for Krytox! and SnickHound are GREAT (I'm super jealous of your ability to use chaotic lines to make these figures, they feel so alive!). I've always pondered how to make it possible for players to eventually become semi-mythical characters like Krytox!

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  3. These are all nice but The Eye Phantasmagoric made my day, that's excellent.

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  4. I had a hagfish monster in a recent session. The guys were in a temple to the Frog God (He who multiplies in darkness, He who raises us from slime, etc) and came to the chambers of transformation where the Hellboy-type frog abominations were created, and the head monk there had an aquarium of hagfish and basins of water, so he could throw hagfish into the water and they'd become walking slime creatures and try to suck out the guys' blood and suffocate them and stuff, and the guys had to hit the hagfish suspended in the center of the slime creatures, and then the druid remembered he could dominate animals, otherwise it would have been certain death. It was dope, a really great monster. Your take is cool too. And the Eye Phantasmagoric is fantastic, I'll be stealing that for sure.

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  5. I had a hagfish monster in a recent session. The guys were in a temple to the Frog God (He who multiplies in darkness, He who raises us from slime, etc) and came to the chambers of transformation where the Hellboy-type frog abominations were created, and the head monk there had an aquarium of hagfish and basins of water, so he could throw hagfish into the water and they'd become walking slime creatures and try to suck out the guys' blood and suffocate them and stuff, and the guys had to hit the hagfish suspended in the center of the slime creatures, and then the druid remembered he could dominate animals, otherwise it would have been certain death. It was dope, a really great monster. Your take is cool too. And the Eye Phantasmagoric is fantastic, I'll be stealing that for sure.

    ReplyDelete