GUEST WEEK: Crypt Thing by Adam Vian

The Crypt Thing is a guardian of sacred places and objects, which sits atop an ancient stone throne. It's a reanimated corpse, brought back by priests, to do away with intruders and thieves in a nonlethal manner. If it ever comes to force, the Crypt Thing will first scatter his opponents with minor teleportation magic. Despite being undead, it's not evil and can be civil with those who don't present a threat to him or his charge.

Round two of guest week comes to a close by an encore image from a previous guest, Adam Vian. He's recently put out a game he did in collaboration with Catherine Unger called From Beyond, which is quite delightful and spooky. And another game which I've always enjoyed and feel the need to bring to your attention is The Arrow Of Time (included: time travel, elemental arrows, a little soldier with a whistle for a head).

GUEST WEEK: Kuo-Toa by Jack Cunningham

The Kuo-Toa are a race of malevolent amphibious humanoids living in coastal areas. They are violent and worship their own goddess, Blibdoolpoolp, "Sea Mother" in their own language, to whom they give bloody sacrifices. Their skin produces a sticky slime, giving them an edge when it comes to wrestling. Their signature weapon is a spear with a pincer at the end, which they use to immobilize large opponents.

Image given to us by Jack Cunningham, an illustrator-animator with a defined graphic style. He and Joe Bichard are responsible for the very lovely film Mars!, a film about space travel with some extra messages about our effect on the planet.

GUEST WEEK: Bog Giant by James Lancett

The Bog Giant is one of the smaller members of the giant family - as their name suggests, they primarily live in swamps. Having developed some oddly amphibian characteristics appropriate for their surroundings, these creatures stalk their territory in search of large reptiles such as black dragons and crocodiles to hunt and eat. Despite being their prey and their main source of clothing, crocodiles are venerated by bog giants, and are sometimes kept as pets.

This image was drawn by yet another illustrator-animator, this one named James Lancett. He's done a really nice cover for the Puffin competition for James and The Giant Peach.

GUEST WEEK: Blackstone Gigant by Charlie Hamill

The Blackstone Gigant is a gargantuan guardian of unholy temples. Created from massive blocks of dark stone by evil priests, they are usually carved in the shape of many-armed female demons. They're unlike other golems in that Blackstone Gigants have basic malignant intelligence. Her touch can turn her victims to stone, allowing her to cruelly shatter their petrified bodies to make into morbid jewellery. Should she choose not to shatter them, she can bring them back to life later on, completely under her control. Despite their massive size and cumbersome bodies, Blackstone Gigants are capable of effortless flight.

This image is brought to you by Charlie Ray Hamill. He's also an excellent photographer and a huge fan of glamorous and dangerous ladies.

Sorry about the late double-post (this was supposed to be up yesterday), but we're currently enjoying a short holiday in Spain and wifi-equipped cafés are a little harder to come by than we anticipated. Oh well!

GUEST WEEK: Ethereal Filcher by Joe Bichard

The Ethereal Filcher is a mischievous creature that travels between our plane and its wispy ethereal neighbour. Truly bizarre-looking creatures (but surprisingly benign), they are the embodiment of pan-dimensional kleptomania, and will stalk people endlessly waiting for them to let their guard down, only to quickly teleport across into our world and filch their belongings. Their lairs are full of purloined goods.

Image kindly provided by by Joe Bichard, another illustrator-animator from jolly ol' Angle-land. He's one of the members of the Colour Club art collective (which includes the Joe Sparrow half of our Dungeons and Drawings team), whose current project is a selection of animated concert visuals for the musician Kidda.

GUEST WEEK: Wolf-in-Sheep's-Clothing by Third Rail Design Lab

This creature appears as a tree stump with a rabbit sitting on its shorn edge. But on getting closer the stump reveals teeth and tentacles; the rabbit is just the lure it used to draw you in.

Image is provided by Third Rail Design Lab, a comic/illustrator. Yeahhhhh, this is one of those creatures that got excluded from further editions of D&D because it's just a little too silly to take seriously, even for this game. The fact that the rabbit is a part of the creature's body seals the deal. And its name doesn't really help that much because implies something a little more... something that isn't a stump with a rabbit on its head. It's still a classic though.

Paizo attempts to slightly refluff the monster in their book Misfit Monsters Redeemed by making the creature on top be the last thing it killed; which makes more sense because you kill one adventurer, then you lure the rest to you with images of him.

GUEST WEEK: Banshee by Matt Layzell

The Banshee is a hideous female monster, ghostly and fearsome in apperance, always preceeded by her unholy howls. She is the spirit of a woman who in life was dominated by jealousy and hatred, and in death is consumed by envy of the living. Her wails slay all life around her.

Welcome to the first day of our second ever Guest Week. We've got some more artists for you offering up their personal interpretations of various D&D monsters. Up first is Matt Layzell, a super cool illustrator-slash-animator. His work may be better known among any English people following this blog; he and his studio Treat is responsible for the very cool Slackers Club spots on Channel 4.

Alchemical Golem

Alchemical golems are constructs created by wizards with a special talent for potions. They made of several expensive and rare alchemical liquids contained within a tough membrane. These liquids, along with a trapped elemental spirit, are what makes this giant creature lumber forward. It's touch is acidic and piercing its membrane results in the corrosive liquids within spilling out, before the membrane repairs itself. An alchemical golem must cosume vats of alchemical liquids to replace those lost to physical damage.

Guest week soon, fellow watchers.

Grisgol

A Grisgol is a strange construct, made haphazardly but nonetheless dangerous. Its body is comprised of a tattered mass of various magical items, loosely held together by mummy-like bandages of spell scrolls and wards. Its arm might be a sword or staff; its head an enchanted helm, or its insides a clinking stack of alchemical potions - their highly chaotic, magical nature makes them immune to most magical effects. In addition to this, the enchantments usually used to power an ordinary golem are simply too weak to bring Grisgols to life; they are usually powered by a Lich's phylactery - a small trinket such as a jewel or phial containing the soul of a dead sorcerer. This makes them doubly dangerous - not only are their physical bodies corrosive and unstable, their souls are ancient and malicious.

Our second guest week begins tomorrow! As with last time, we'll be updating with a new image every day for a whole week, involving a bunch of different artists with different styles. Check back each day for some new artsy goodness.

Kraken

Krakens are gargantuan leviathans of the deep, intelligent and predatory. Mostly seen by sailors (and even then rarely) these squid-like creatures devour ships whole or drag them beneath the waves as prisoners to their underground cave-lairs, where they keep slaves to serve and feed them.

One day I'll upload one of these on time again! Remember what that was like? When I used to upload on a Sunday? That was nice. In my defence my main job as a comic book artist is sort of spilling over into the weekends and I also do a bunch of other stuff (STARCRAFT2COUGHCOUGH)

Pixelly stuff again this week, sorry if you prefer the more brushy sort of drawing. Also why am I so fond of hi-contrast colours? I guess it satisfies my inner purist. These colours make for such nice, simple hexadecimal values! #000000, #FF00FF, #0000FF, I could go on.

Displacer Beast

The Displacer Beast is an alien-looking creature, with sleek fur and multiple limbs, which include an extra pair of legs and two muscular tentacles that sprout from its shoulders. It's the size of a tiger, intelligent and malicious. In addition to these already formidable assets, this creature is able to bend light around itself, causing its outline to duplicate and blur (or displace), making it difficult to hit.

The Displacer Beast is another of those classic D&D monsters. It's also one of those classic scifi monsters; this creature is lifted from the coeurl, an alien created by the science fiction writer Alfred Eton Van Vogt.

This is a pretty popular monster, mostly because it's weird and cool looking, and felines are always well-loved monsters. But in most of the images I looked up for the Displacer Beast, they were all Beast and no Displacer. When I started trying to plan this image, it became apparent why this is. It's hard to do in an interesting way, man.

Battlebriar

Battlebriars are actually huge plants, magically grown by teams of druids to serve as living siege engines. Galloping along on six muscular legs, they resemble huge, knotted masses of bark and huge thorns, making attacking one in melee combat a treacherous task to say the least (to take no account of the creature's monstrous size). Often proving too wild for their creators to control, many Battlebriars now roam free in the forests of the world, killing indescriminately to feed.

Inspired a lot by horned lizards and by one of my favourite magic cards. I like how you have this stereotype of druids being peaceful hippies - I imagine one day they all just had enough of people ripping on them and thought "fuck it, let's make some CR 15 living siege weapons, that'll teach them to make fun of us". Those craaaaazy druids.

Kappa

The kappa is a small amphibious creature, half turtle, half man. Though sometimes malevolent, kappas are extremely curteous beings and won't harm anyone who shows them politeness and respect. The top of their head is hollow and filled with water. When the water is tipped out of their heads, they become extremely weak and immediately dash for the nearest source of water.

This monster is brought to you by the Oriental Adventures setting and Japanese mythology. I always liked this monster, even when I first read about it in a mythology book when I was itty bitty. According to these books, the kappas' favourite food was cucumbers and a sure way to get on their good side was to give them cucumbers with your name carved into it.