Marzanna

The Marzanna appears as an old woman, frostbite-blue and dressed in torn rags of animal hide. Despite its relatively humanoid appearance, the Marzanna is far beyond human - viewed by villagers as a personification of death and winter, she wanders the snowy wastes, tricking stray travellers and feasting on their cold flesh. Tales tell that if you can trick a Marzanna, you can fool death himself.

Merry belated christmas! Both our monsters this week come from the Frostburn book, something of a nod towards the fiendishly chilly climes we currently find ourselves in. Hags are some cool creatures, and the Marzanna is one of my favourites. The name actually comes from an old Russian goddess of winter which in some parts of the world is still venerated each year by burning, then "drowning" her effigy to bring winter to an end. Cool, huh? My picture this week is sort of special in that the inking was actually done with a pen by hand. I still used photoshop to comp it all together but I think i need to at least start more stuff by hand! Using a computer still feels like the quick-and-easy route. Maybe that can be my new years' resolution!

Snow Weird

The Snow Weird is a diviner hailing form the Elemental Plane of Air. Her face is so bright it can't be looked at, and her whirling lower body tapers to pool of rumbling snow. She's is able to predict fortune and destruction, much like an Earth Weird. However, she's more powerful and fickle than her stony counterpart. She sometimes decides to surround her territory in snowstorms and whirlwinds for the sake of it, regardless of who may get trapped in them.

Enjoy your winter-related festivities, y'all.

Fire Giant

The Fire Giants are the second smallest of the true giants, next to the oafish Hill Giant, but they don't share their cousin's low intellect. They're a highly organized people, merciless, militaristic, and almost always at war with their neighbours. Their invulnerability to fire leads them to make lairs in volcanoes and use flaming weaponry.


Special treat! A (kinda) animated post!

This was animated in After Effects, which is something I sometimes have trouble coming to grips with. I'm more used to using more traditional methods or Flash. Hopefully there'll be more animated posts in the future. Hopefully they'll be GIFs because this whole having to upload a video thing is pretty tiresome.

Edit:

Also an image, because the quality of that video isn't what it could be.

Rust Monster

The Rust Monster is a squat quadrupedal creature covered in thick chitin of a dirty orange colour. It gets its name from its diet - the two long antennae protruding from beneath its eyes are capable of instantly rusting and disintegrating any and all metals they come into contact with, even those with magical enhancements. The Rust Monster then proceeds to devour the oxidised scraps which are its main food source.

The Rust Monster is an infamous creature and the bane of many an adventurer - that nice, shiny new +2 enhancement sword of impaling you picked up in the last dungeon? Disintegrated in seconds. The funny part is the creature itself isn't even that strong. Trying to go for a more gouache-ish effect in this one. As requested by /tg/!

Defacer

A Defacer is an undead creature formed when the spirit of a shapechanging creature, such as a Doppelganger, is animated by a necromancer. Most ordinary creatures, once risen in such a way, will generally keep the form they held in life. Shapechangers, however, barely having a definite form or identity to start with, are brought back as dark, blank, faceless creatures, and their utter absence of identity compels them to "steal" the faces of those around them, a horrific ability which leaves the victim's face featureless. The many faces they "collect" in this way swim about their body, keening frightfully.

Been working a lot in what I guess would be called pixelart lately, essentially eschewing anti-aliasing of any kind and getting down and dirty with each individual pixel. It's really satisfying, it actually feels a lot to me like painting but there's a really nice, economic feel to it because you can only get so much detail in, every pixel has to be in the right place. anyway, another quick one this week, I'm actually a week behind now so I'll probably be doing another one tomorrow!

Violet Fungus

The Violet Fungus is a man-sized, flesh-eating mushroom that primarily dwells in subterranean caverns. The mushroom can move, albeit very slowly. It's common to find it living among patches of another variety of predatory mushroom, the Shrieker, which can attract prey by emitting a sound like a person or animal in danger. This lures them within striking range of the Violet Fungus' poisoned tentacles.


Yup, plants can be enemies in D&D. You're never really safe. This is another request, suggested by Slagger the Chuul of the Wizards of the Coast forums.

Century Worm

The Century Worm is a rare giant creature that can appear in any part of the world. It's a mindless creature, uncontrollable, born to eat and moves across the landscape making deafening screeching noises. It's large enough to swallow a horse whole, and anything it eats will be broken down by more than stomach acid; the Century Worm's stomach carries millions of its young.

This creature is one of the more high-level encounters, where a character needs to be at Conan levels of strength and Merlin levels of magic. It's a pretty slow creature, so it's always possible to run away.

Couatl

The Couatl is a legendary winged snake native to warm forests. They are highly magical and innately good, making them excellent creatures to run into in most situations (unless you happen to be evil). High-level spellcasters have Summon Couatl available to them as a spell, which, if learnt, can be used to greatly bolster the magical power of any band of adventurers.

Couatl, is, of course, a reference to the mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl, who (typical of aztec gods) has some really cool primitive artwork of him. I took inspiration from the colours commonly used to depict him (green/blue) but otherwise tried to do something a little more abstract. Also drawing lots of feathers takes a long time D: This weeks' monsters were both requests, this one being the request of giantitp.com forum user Serpentine.

Spirit Naga

Nagas are snakelike creatures, and are, by and large, rather evil. They inhabit the dark and dank parts of the world, using their strength, cunning and magical ability to keep lesser creatures in thrall.

Nagas, like Liches and Beholders, fit in nicely as an enemy in almost any campaign - their predilection for evil and accumulation of underlings serves them well as a "final boss" sort of character. Their name is taken from a variety of snake-spirits in eastern mythology, the Nāga, which also lend their name to Voldemort's pet snake.

Another relative quickie this week, I have plenty to do! I think next week we're going to be doing some more requests.

Otyugh

The Otyugh is one of the more repugnant creatures of the world. It lives in filth, consumes it, and there are even varieties of the monster where their appearance varies according to the specific kind of waste they're surrounded with. While not specifically evil, they're governed by their stomachs. But they're intelligent enough to strike basic deals; its common for more intelligent beings to use them as guardians or as waste disposal.


This is one of Dungeon and Dragons' classic creatures, appearing in the first Monster Manual and thought up by Gary Gygax himself. They're really bizarre looking creatures, with a tentacle coming out of their head that acts as a visual and olfactory organ.

Lucky the Goblin and Bones the Wolf

Golin "Lucky" Muutdar is one of the most skilled scouts in Willow Vale, and a high-ranked member of the Royal Outriders. With his trusted mount Bones, he guards the western hills of the Vale, watching for enemies.

So this week we decided to do our most recent PCs, which we played with a really nice group in a campaign for the Willow Vale setting. I decided to do a goblin ranger. Normally these guys are evil creatures, but in the continuity of the campaign, goblins had recently become good. In the campaign we were sent back into the past to stop the race of elves to be completely wiped out by prehistoric giants.

I mostly acted as the scout for the party, since when riding on the wolf I had the fastest land speed. I'd go up ahead, make sure everything was fine, and use this house one of the other characters had to teleport back to the party. The other guys did the brunt of the damage, since I only had my dinky little arrows.

We got ambushed while I was scouting ahead. The team did a really good job of defending themselves (barbarian, paladin, cleric, wizard and a rogue), and I helped out mostly by casting spells that could slow down the enemy enough so as to not overwhelm the other guys. At one point the giants shot like 12 arrows at me, and none hit.

It was a really awesome game.

Olaf Ullathorne

Olaf Ullathorne is a fierce warrior of the mountain-clans of Trosk, a sporadic scattering of settlements among the highest and most ferocious peaks of the southern mountains. Considerably stronger and larger than the average warrior (the Ullathorne clan was rumoured to carry giant blood), he has travelled the land working essentially as muscle-for-hire, but is known to be more discerning than his peers when it comes to morals. His weapon of choice is as large and intimidating as he is - a gigantic, two-handed staff bound at one end with a fierce tangle of antlers, mountain-lion teeth and flint blades known as a sugliin - which was once his clan's ancestral totem. His family brutally slaughtered by a neighboring tribe, he now wields it in the name of his ancestors; even though their bloodline has come to an end, the legendary Ullathorne clan will live on through his deeds.

This is the character I had the pleasure of playing in the recent campaign the guys at the London D&D Meetups group held, DMed by Simon Newall. I'm not particularly characterful with my roleplaying but I certainly enjoyed killing three half-giants in one round of combat in a particularly grizzly fight (pictured above). :3