Mimic

It takes on whatever shape is most appealing.

The origin of the mimic isn't completely certain, but the most popular theory is that a wizard did it. And with their track record, it's not exactly a slight chance that it could be true. At any rate, mimics currently roam free in the dungeons, tricking adventurers with their appealing shapes.

If the mimic has an original shape, it hasn't been recorded. Perhaps they can only have the shape of a pre-existing thing. The mimic is a shapeshifter specializing in inanimate objects, and best known for looking like especially nice treasure chests that go on to sprout sticky limbs. But a mimic will gladly take on the shape of a larger object such as a door, part of a wall, and so on. Some of these monsters are massive enough to pose as houses. Watch out for huts that smell of saliva, is all I'm saying.

The mimic or treasure-chest monster is pretty iconic across tabletop games and video games. I think the first game I ever encountered this sort of monster in was in Dragon Quest III on my Gameboy Color. It was a fun game.

Hope you peeps are having some nice Winter holidays.

Lodestone Marauder

The Lodestone Marauder is yet another creature from a wizard's lab that was made for a certain purpose, then got loose. This particular creature has magnetic powers and an insatiable hunger for metal and meat. Pretty good for letting lose in the battlefield and having in chow down on the soldiers, including their armor and weapons. And if somebody is being a bit too effective at swinging their axe, well it can just turn on the magnetism and the weapon gets stuck on their spikes.

The wild ones tend to live underground. There's lots of tasty ore down there and relative safety. The drow and other deep-dwelling creatures sometimes make an attempt at taming one of these fellas, but I imagine their feeding habits can get pretty expensive.

My computer's been busted for the better part of a week. It's been pretty miserable, since you get used to having a machine to do all your art on and forget how traditional means work. But Joe kept pushing me to do the traditional way and I was all like "ehhhhhhh" and he was all like "do it" and I was all like "ehhhhhhhhh, fine" and now I'm pretty happy with the final results. Collage made from painted and non-painted tin foil.

Disenchanter

Aw dang, I shouldn'ta given the PCs that staff; they're really screwing over my campaign. I'd better break out the big guns.

The Disenchanter is yet another creature in the category of silly creations by wizards, although this an also be classified as "silly things generals commission from silly wizards to fight other silly wizards". Like the Rust Monster, the Disenchanter is another creature in the DMs arsenal which can be (ab)used to take those uppity PCs down a peg.

At CR 17 (14 levels higher than the Rust Monster), with high AC and lots of hit points, it guarantees the destruction of a few magic items. It's a large, giraffe-like creature with a long sticky tongue it uses to grab objects from a character and begin draining the enchantments out of them, turning them into relatively useless mundane objects. It feeds on the drained magic.

The Disenchanter literally exists only to take away the characters' toys. Let me read from the Fiend Folio to you: "The Disenchanter ignores individuals who do not radiate magic and lopes away if there's no food to be found, even if it's attacked."

So a Disenchanter attacks the party. Staff of sphere of annihilation? Well, now it's a stick. And your +5 ring of protection is now a regular gaudy ring. Also your potions are now water. And now the Disenchanter's walked away. Wow, that sucked. I guess you guys shoulda rolled higher on your Spot checks, huh.

Knell Beetle

The Knell Beetle is yet another creature you can add to the list of the products of bored wizards. Because sometimes you have to merge a bug with a bell.

Only the description in the Monster Manual is a creature with ten legs, claws and a red carapace. That's a crab, dawg, not a beetle. I couldn't decide on what shape to give them, as you can see, because I quickly found out that it's silly. Because knell beetles are tooting lobsters.

Oh and these things are CR 10, as big as cars and move in colonies. So if you feel like finding one to laugh at, you should probably wait a few levels.

Owlbear by Tara Helfer

I'm gonna be doing some work for an project called 72 Demons. A collection of artists will each be doing one of the demons features in Ars Goetia, a 17th century grimoire. The head of this project, Tara Helfer, offered to do an art trade, where I do a header for her blog and she submits a monster for mine. Well, I haven't gotten around to my side of the deal yet, but she certainly has. She even prepared the blurb for me.

      

Owlbears are probably the crossbred creation of a demented wizard; given the lethality of this creation, it is quite likely that the wizard who created them is no longer alive. Owlbears are vicious, ravenous, aggressive, and evil tempered at all times. Owlbears are a cross between a giant owl and a bear. They are covered with a thick coat of feathers and fur, brown-black to yellow-brown in color. The 8-foot-tall males, which weigh between 1,300 and 1,500 pounds, are darker colored. The beaks of these creatures are yellow to ivory and their terrifying eyes are red-rimmed. Owlbears speak their own language, which consists of very loud screeches of varying length and pitch.
An owlbear's main weakness is also its greatest strength -- its ferocity. Because owlbears are so bad-tempered, they stop at nothing to kill a target. It is not difficult to trick an owlbear into hurling itself off a cliff or into a trap, provided you can find one.

The owlbear walks a line between the whimsical and the most fearsome beasts. Art featuring the owlbear tends to split in two different directions. Apart from the big, bad and bloodthirsty, there's a tendency to draw the owlbear as an awkward and misunderstood creature - pretty embarrassing for a killer. And why not? The owlbear doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of evolution and is excessively armed for a forest predator, making it my favorite d&d monster.
I wanted to draw the owlbear with a more flexible, feathery form rather than a bear's. While it's known for it's deadly "hug", I imagine the face-full of beak following would be much worse.

      

Also, my kobold illustration was used in a website called Delvers, where the 2e campaign stories of guy, his girlfriend and her two itty girls  are collected.

Howler Wasp

This creature didn't happen naturally, as many creatures do, but was the mistake of the paranoid wizard Otiulke. Seeking to protect himself from Slaadi enemies, he sought to create a fierce guardian animal. His initial experiment provided the Howler Wasps, a combination of monkey and hornet. They proved to be too vicious to control, but Otiulke was caught and killed before he could destroy his creation. They escaped and have since been spreading through the world, creating giant nests ruled over by a monstrous Queen.


Really, what do you expect when you try to make a something that combines the cuddlyness of a wasp with the friendliness of a baboon? Fortunately, the howler wasps are fairly small creatures, about the size of a dog (which I guess is still a little too big) and fairly weak. However, killing one means that the body begins secreting a pheromone that attracts other wasps and drives them into a frenzy.

Just set the nest on fire.