Allip

Ghosts are created when the person's death happens when there's unfinished business in the world of the living and/or under especially traumatic circumstances. The allip is specifically the ghost of someone who was driven to madness and, eventually, suicide. As a result, the allip is both insane and vengeful, focusing its attention on those it blames for its traumatic death.

The allip can't communicate verbally, but babbles a constant stream of nonsense noise that attracts the attention of anybody that hears it. This ghost is completely incorporeal, but those who have been "touched" by the insubtantial shade report a cold shrivelling in their brains, similar to the feeling that mediums have reported when attempting psychic communication with it. If the allip has focused its attention on you, it's impossible to escape without divine aid.

Allips can be confused with banshees, a similar wailing, vengeful spirit. However, allips have no discernable gender and their voice is nowhere near as deadly.

Moving on from constructs (for now)! Allips are a monster that gets complained about on occasion because its abilities are what is called "save or die". Essentially, creatures have attacks or abilities which are normally countered by your own defenses. An orc with a club will have to bypass your armour in order to deal damage, a dragon's fire breath will have to bypass your Reflex (itself your natural dexterity plus any bonuses you have). But an allip's Madness ability has no save against it, and its incoporeal touch only has to phase though armour. While they deal no physical damage, the allip's attacks deal ability damage, your stats instead of your HP. As a low-level monster, you're probably not going to have access to the means needed for healing your stats. Meaning that in 4 hits an allip can essentially render your character unplayable by reducing it's Wisdom stat to 0, driving it insane.

If you see an allip, run.

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Iron Colossus

The forbidden palace-city of the Dread King Irek is an alluring quarry for treasure-hunters. Abruptly and mysteriously abandoned by both its master and its thousands of apparent denizens for hundreds of years, its halls remain a trove of wealth, technology and magical artifacts that few thieves could resist. As many have discovered, however, the city is not unattended.

It is assumed that the six building-sized iron golems, known affectionately as the Daughters of Irek, act as caretakers of the Dread King's earthly remnants in his absence. Nobody can be sure, of course, for they do not speak. The slow, relentless beat of their unimaginably heavy paces can be heard for miles around as they patrol the great streets, tricking some into thinking that they are docile, or even mindless. Despite appearing to lack any great sensory faculties, however, the moment any intruder crosses the threshold of the great city, the Daughters wordlessly break from their patrol and converge on the offending creature. Seeming to simply "sense" its presence, they continue to pursue it until they have the opportunity to destroy it, which they do invariably and without hesitation. Only once the intruder has been slain do they ponderously return once more to their mysterious pattern.

Happy 2017! Insert my usual platitudes about not posting enough here, etc etc. Here's an Iron Colossus! Predictably, all the Colossi listed in the Epic Level Handbook are of the colossal size category which is essentially the largest meaningful size category that is statted within the D&D system (everything larger is simply lumped under "colossal plus"), so they are some truly big boys. I probably should have put some stuff in there to show scale (a la my oversized Cadaver Collector from a couple of years ago) but honestly I just kind of went in guns blazing on this one and didn't think about it too much. I guess the stomps kind of suggest a very large size? I don't know. It's always a struggle for me to work out the amount of detail/effort/attention to put into large drawings (which I know sounds weirdly lazy - of course I should put effort into everything I do), but I find it very easy to overthink things, so sometimes I have to try and work against that and just do something that's a bit more relaxed. I'm mostly saying this to justify to myself why this drawing looks a bit crude compared to the Cadaver Collector despite that drawing being two years old. But it's ok.

One of the reasons I was trying to stay quite relaxed about this drawing was because I made a time-lapse video of me making it! This is something I've wanted to do for quite a while (people often ask me about my process and I'm wayy too shy an artist to livestream myself drawing or whatever so this seemed like the next best thing). I usually do a few more design ideas at the beginning and there are usually a lot of false starts - sometimes i'll literally get halfway through cleaning up an illustration and then abruptly decide I hate it and start again - with this one I tried to just start drawing and keep going until I got done. I'll definitely try and do this again in future - if only because I really enjoyed picking the music (which, if you're interested, is from Undertale).

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Ice Golem

The ice golem! Terrifying frozen construct of the cold wastes, servant of sorcerers of frost! These towering guardians wander the snowy surroundings of their masters' domains and can swiftly glide across or climb any icy surface. The power to animate this creature is held in the runes that have been carved into its body. For offensive capabilities, the golem is capable of shooting great shards of ice from its body, tearing surrounding intruders to shreds. Yowza!

Of course the ice golem can also be created by the wishes of children. Not quite as powerful or big as something made by a wizard or druid, and prone to free will, but still pretty impressive.

A somewhat belated Christmas / New Year's image for the blog. But it's still winter and the twelve days of Christmas are barely over so... eh?

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