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.
Hard? But you pulled it off so well! Creepy, trippy and fearsome all at once. I really love how the face feels iconic, like a mayan carving. This is the first displacer beast that makes me instinctively reach for the dice to test a sanity check, and not the d20 to bash 'im!
ReplyDeleteAs well-drawn as a lot of the images are in the many many books of D&D, I think it's a shame that the artists don't exploit some of the signature abilities. There's a lot of monsters I don't think are any good or fun until I read their stats and find all the weird junk they can do.
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