Inktober 2019

/Artwork #Prompts

Mimic Rings

Vile vermin that pass themselves off as magic items with desirable properties. Will wait until their victim is in a stressed or agitated state before striking, such as in the middle of combat. The lose of fingers happens automatically, and worse, the lose of grip on your weapon at critical moment.

Skullfish

Floating, flying, sightless, soundless, and thoughtless. Found hiding among the growths and fungi of cave ceilings. Tendrils drop to grapple prey with “bright thoughts”, with the jelly body encasing the head. Drains experiences and memories, resulting in cumulative penalties to random skills.

Funguile

In the wild, it is a small carnivorous fungus that purposely mimics the nests and burrows of local fauna, to paralyse and consume when disturbed. Tribespeople have cultivated larger varieties, breeding them to instead copy a corpse’s coins and weaponry. The fungus’ paralysingly spores don’t last long and aren’t strong enough to kill, but the abusing tribespeople easily finish the job.

Fissurpent

Found in frigid northern climates, and hunts almost exclusively on frozen lakes or icy sea shores. A living crack in the ice surface, striking at the boots at the weary and tired. Defending yourself risks increasing its size, with the ice under your feet possibly giving way completely.

Automarionettes

Puppet golems by some forgotten wizard. Only knee high and made of wood, they are rarely a threat to anyone... at least, not directly. Following an old embedded command, they continually create duplicates of themselves. Needing material, they will tear down entire forests, lengths of fences, whole bridges, and villages worth of houses. If allowed to grow into a sizeable group, they can increase exponentially and wipe clean a country of its resources.

Spectral pack beast

Woodland creatures don't "cling" to the material world as people do. But when a close knit pack or family group is brutally wronged, their animal shades can remain as a whole. Individually, they may have accepted their fate, but together as a single spiritual entity, they demand for vengeance with a savagery completely alien to intelligent humanoid minds.

Spellbook committee

Magic written maintains its power, in some cases enough to grant itself sentience. When this happens enough a wizard's spellbook, with each individual page is its own individual, they form a parliament, theocracy, or dictatorship. Beware this collective group working in concert, overwhelming adventurers with coordinated barrages of effects.

Stained glass scorpion

Venomous, aggressive, and fast, they strike multiple times at a chance. They are a container of toxic liquid in an animated coloured glass container. Easy to smash or break, but with their reservoir being highly pressurised, they explode like a grenade, throwing poisoned shrapnel flying.

Hookfling giant

Its like fly-fishing, but for cattle, sheep, and people. From the safety of a high cliff or across a deep river, a giant skilled can snag prey out from among a group and swing his catch back his position, where they make quick work of the separated, lone meal-to-be.

Parasitic motifs

A living design usually trapped on inanimate objects, commonly vases or jars. If freed, they can leap onto living creatures and apply themselves as tattoos. They are completely immune to physical attacks, as you only risk harming the object or person they are attached to. A sufficiently skilled artist may be able to rework the designs back onto an inanimate object, re-imprisoning it.

Blue dwarves

While their mountain cousins obsess with precious metals, these dwarves search frigid climates for crystals, gems, and diamonds. Their blue skin and ice filled beards are signs that they have long adapted to the colds. Some of the few dwarves to master and prefer the spear, for hunting and warfare.

Anti-dragon

Passionate people with great reason to loathe dragons can undergo a transformation, becoming creatures that hunts and kill drakes, wyrms, and dragons of all kinds. They quickly take on aspects of dragonkind themselves, mutating into colossal, abominable lindworms. In a strange mirror of their new prey, they have an instictual need to prize and hoard all dragon bones, their "treasures".

Warp spasms

Evil sacrifices made into volcanos can poison its core. When the mountain erupt, any of the cursed ash that settles on living creature turns them into inside-out monstrosities. These poor souls are cursed to hunt down the cults, sects, or empires that committed the original sacrifices in the volcano. Neither they nor the erupting volcano will rest until they succeed.

Daliphants

Colossal, magnificent beasts, towering over forests, hills, and palaces. All but extinct in modern times, some still roam in hidden valleys and lands afar. They are highly prized by kings and emperors wanting the impressive beast as a mount, to literally oversee their domain.

Elemental maze

A wizardly structure, normally of hedges or walls, constructed to confuse, entraps an elemental spirit. When the elemental becomes lost within the maze, it takes the form of the structure and the entrapping conceptual space as well. Space, scale, and distance loses meaning, allowing it both slip under door cracks and engulf whole cities. It will desperately entrap as many intelligent creatures as it can into its labyrinthian other-space, in hopes one of them can escape and, by doing so, free the spirit itself.

Tigazelle

Imagine a tiger the size of a great buck, with the swiftness of the fastest pronghorn, and eight tearing claws of the most vicious raptor you've known. Now I can assure you, they are even more so than that, in every measure. And worse, they hunt in packs.

Virulent pyrite

A yellowish metallic mud, gritty in texture, persistent but usually harmless. It can get accidentally collected with gold, mixed in and becoming an alloy in the forging of rings, amulets, and crowns. Worn over long periods, this toxic substance fuses with tissue and infects the brain, creating a mania, an obsession, a greed for more gold.

Bluecap

Found in the lost darkness of caves and mines, their black skin providing perfect camouflage in those dim tunnels. Where their redcap cousins prefer blood to dye their headwear, these crave your fats for their candles, and your bones for their tools. If you are desperate, their services can be purchased for a fair wage, though you may not agree with their definition of "fair".

Gorillarachnid

Actually more an order of enormous spider than a primate. They are territorial jealousy and have the enormous strength of their mammal namesakes. Along with their eight obvious legs, they actually have eight more smaller limbs on their back, where they carry their eggs and spiderling children in a web-woven cradle. The injury or death of any of their younglings, accidental or otherwise, will immediately send the beast into an uncontrollable rage.

Piratnas

Swarms of pest fish, each about the size of a large sardine. Naturally oily, their mere presence inevitably poisons waters, making it unfit for drinking. And they are notorious disease carriers, killing off all other water life in an area as they spread and breed. They are fast swimmers and are viciously aggressive when gathered in large schools.

Glassalisk

Described as a sort of armadillo, though exact details are scant as, like their more common kin, their gaze means death. In their case, rather than turning to stone, the victims are petrified into a transparent glass, with their hearts condensing into a massive flawless ruby. To recover even one of those red gems would make a man rich for life, assuming he doesn't become a victim himself. Too many greedy adventure has perished, being unable to hide within the beast's clear glass lair, or by having their spells wildly refracted in unexpected directions.

Banishee

To suffer the scream of this tormented ghost is to be cast bodily out of the material world. Releasing this spirit from its suffering is difficult enough without it literally discharging you, your allies, and in some cases, entire structures, out from all from known existence and into an unknown other realm.

Testudino

A truly ancient species of tree that, with the passage of centuries, becomes capable of mobility. It's roots thicken and wrap around the hill it's grounded in. And when enough roots have found solid rock to push against, they act as legs, tearing free at last. The final evolution is the serpentine-like heads, formed to defend itself against any inevitable challengers... for legends claim that to engulf yourself in the smoke of testudino wood is to open a passage to the past.

Matyranno

Lichdom is not the only path motivated wizards find to claim vast power and virtual immortality. Rather than taking the route of undeath, some twist themselves into the aberrant forms of beholders. Doing so warps their minds, absorbing knowledge and perceptions alien and hypercosmic.

Marrow elves

Noble warriors that undertook antediluvian oaths to end all undeath. Tragically, they are held to these oaths far past their own passing. They become half ethereal, only partially in the material world at any time. They sustain themselves on the marrow of the undead the hunt, though when hunting is poor, they are know to pillage graves and scavenge battlefields for any sort of humanoid bones.

Swailing hunger

A fire elemental that embodies uncontrolled gluttony. As it grows and fattens, it greedily absorbs all fire, all warmth, all light, in a ever growing radius, plunging surrounding lands in a cold, blinding darkness.

Tamed cloaker

Training such an unruly beast is difficult, but if successful, a knight carries upon him a layer of loyal, living armour. Even with their wings slashed to prevent flight, the creatures are ferocious and unpredictable to an enemy, camouflaging their master's attacks while mixing in some their own. Knights who carry these pets are known for ferocious strength and indomitable endurance, as they must be able to carry the extra weight of the creature draped across their shoulders.

Cordycepicats

A feline race of poets, philosophers, politicians, and spies. They keep their communities hidden and their numbers secret, making deals with kings and emperors in exchange for safety and autonomy. They communicate with other species by embedding their needle-like claws into the nervous system of other creatures, controlling them as an extension of themselves. In this way, they can talk through a man’s mouth, travel with a horse’s stamina, or make war with an owl bear’s strength.

Monsmalic

If a sacred mountain is injured or wronged, a great stone beast is birthed to revenged against the perpetrators. With a body of living bedrock, it is near impossible to defeat, and even if you succeed, it will just be birthed again on the next new moon. Only appeasement of the mountain itself will finally let this creature rest.

Cerewnns

Many magically oaths have consequences for breaking them, but some entities may give you a sporting chance to escape without penalty. Avoid these faerie hounds for a year and a day, and your will be free of your obligations. But it won't be easy. By day they are three wily women with fiery red hair and years of bounty hunting experience. By night, they merge into a three headed canine the size of a warhorse. Rare is the tale where they've failed in their hunt.

Telegourds

A quantum entangled plant resembling an eggplant or a pumpkin, whose fruits grow to truly massive proportions. Through a quirk of a quirk of magic and botany, all patches and all fruits are actually the same patch and the same fruit. This means every living telegourd is the same telegourd across the known world. Used correctly, a living fruit can be carved open and used as a pathway to anywhere any other living telegourd is. But a traveller has to hurry, because as the fruit dies, it "detaches" itself from the other telegourds, and the traveller can become trapped in an ever shrinking, ever rotting elemental plant realm.

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