Bearded Devil (Barbazu)

Bearded devils, called barbazu in Infernal, are on the lower end of the mid-level hierarchy of Hell. As such, they get to be squad leaders. However, since their squads tend to be made up entirely of lemures, it's more like herding and goading irritable sheep. Their short tempers make them ill-suited for greater command. The barbazu itself is quite dangerous, however. Their primary weapon is a serrated glaive which causes persistent bleeding, requiring especially powerful healing magic or skilled surgery. If somehow deprived of their glaive, the barbazu has a not-so-secret weapon: it's eponymous beard.

The barbazu's beard is covered in disease-bearing toothy tendrils. Despite its wormy appearance, the tendrils are not prehensile. Still, the devil's use of them is suitably horrifying; it gets a good grip on a target with its claws and forces them face-first into its gruesome beard, forcing them to endure hundreds of little scrapes and bites. Should said target survive an encounter with the barbazu, they develop a fever which slowly saps them of their strength. The victim becomes too weak to even breathe and suffocates.

A creature we've encountered in our current campaign, as part of Vecna's troops. I've used on myself in a previous campaign, where a character was eviscerated by its claws (no chance for a beard attack). The glaive is a neat weapon, obviously, but nowhere near as colourful as the claw-beard combo. Even though the potential maximum damage of the glaive and claw-beard attacks are essentially the same, I guess the subsequent bleed damage of the glaive puts it over the top. Still, it's kind of a shame.

Notes on the design here. In the books I have (3.5 and 5th edition), the barbazu's beard is described as being snakey. In most illustrations I've seen, this has been interpreted as thick tendrils with pointy ends, like a barbed snake's tail. I decided to go more for the head end of the snake because it's so much more gruesome to have lots of little mouth nibble-nibble-nibbling at you. They turned out a little wormy though. Originally the design had a big mouth as well, but I took that away too. Now instead of having one big mouth, the barbazu has dozens of itty ones. They came out looking more like earthworms than snakes but shhh.

Maybe I should've forgone the single eye too and made it just a blank face, with the beard having his eyes. Lots of little eyes and teeth. Nibble nibble nibble.

Blanca’s Tumblr