Are there any creatures that to your knowledge haven't been made before, but would be a fun/interesting addition to a Fantasy setting? Creatures that are never discussed or used in fantasy stories but have lots of potential are also good.
I'll go first >Wax Ooze Essentially you go into a wizards house and there's a bunch of unlit candles and its very dark, some unwitting adventurers light a few candles and as they melt they move together until there's a massive wad of wax with a bunch of burning wicks on top in a room they've already explored. It would be Immune to Fire damage but weak to cold, since it has to be melted to move.
I'm currently DMing a game and I'm going to throw these at the party when they go into a wizards house.
I've an idea for creatures called Charcoal Sprites - essentially they're spirits or a kind of fey that possess the body (AKA, ashes) of a person who was executed by burning.
Surprisingly they're mostly harmless - the spirits themselves aren't evil but the ashes they inhabit have strong negative emotions attached to them that sway the spirits to generally just run amok. They won't try to kill people but they'll mess up your house and get soot and ash on fucking everything because they're essiantly a whirling cloud of ash and confusion in the vague shape of the person those ashes used to be. The local priesthood doesn't really know how to excorcise them yet and they'll eventually leave on their own, but people would rather they fuck off sooner since they make a mess and are frankly spooky as fuck regardless.
Alexander Moore
Not exactly an orignal creature but having diffrent mimics in games would be fun, less of the generic treasure chest with teeth and maybe have more mimic books, maybe a mimic helmet or even a mimic boat even.
Connor Hughes
bunp
Christopher Russell
...
Parker Thompson
I literally just ran a session where my players entered a storage hall in the mega dungeon they have entered, like, think the storage hall from indiana jones, except every single inanimate object, EVERY SINGLE ONE, is a mimic.
They set the place on fire and barred the only door after spending time being juggled between the mouths of the mimics during opportunity attacks during their escape and undergoing various phases of digestion
Lincoln Adams
another session I ran earlier in the campaign was in a fey-ruled forest. The party and their company of thirty some travel companions were harassed and >replaced< by shapechangers. The modus operandi of the shapechangers isnt to kill people or do anything malicious, they are just unfathomable fey shapechangers doing it for shits and giggles.
Whenever one of the company would get lost, one, maybe two, maybe three fey shapechangers would take his place. They took the forms of men and seemed familiar, but looking at their faces proved unsettling and head-ache inducing. Something was just off.
On top of that, they do not speak language or even have the intelligence to fathom language. They mimic noises phonetically, and the more time they spend in proximity of true humans the better they get at it. Some of them sound like broken records, and the group of them sometimes feeds off the group and end up saying jibberish.
But the ones that stay with the group a long time, the deep cover ones, get so good at mimicking that they are able to string together coherent ideas and sentences purely through phonetics and repetition and learning patterns of speech. Towards the end of their expedition they couldnt trust anyone.
Samuel Thompson
What did they do to the orignals if they didnt kill them?
Jonathan Perry
the originals got lost in the woods. It was enchanted and they were being lead by a druid on a very narrow path and constantly being tempted by visions in the woods. A good majority of the company of men with them were peasants barely qualified with the grit of men at arms and the remainder were prisoners of war. Not to mention they were basically on a death march running low on food and water.
The originals simply got lost in the woods, never to be found. What happened after is anyone's guess.
Its important to note that the shapechangers couldn't assume the perfect forms of the people they were replicating, they sort of just blended in. They did daily headcounts when they made camp each night and after the first few days their number steadily went down by one or two a day, until the third or fourth day when their numbers started rising, and eventually past their original number and they realized something was very very wrong.
Kevin Cook
In my homebrew anything considered "Fey" or "Fairy" are just mortals who delved into magic too much turning them into god like corupted mortals.
Essentially Magic has a mind of it's own and the wizards open themselves to it and their will is ripped apart and their forms are aswell. Theyre hardly recognizable as human or even of this world some time.
>Pic related
Logan Morales
all the fey stuff I'm running is guillermo del toro level nightmare fuel "reasons why humans fear the dark" etc.
Like if demons are outsiders from below, and celestial types are outsiders from above, and tentacle spookies are outsiders from beyond, the fey are outsiders from HERE.
Gavin Flores
I like this idea.
>Well slimes Transparent slimes that live in wells and pools, and purify the water. Their size depends on the the size of their pool or well, with larger pools containing larger well slimes. A typical well slime in a village well is around the size of a kiwi fruit (I think. I haven't eaten a kiwi for years. About 1/3 - 1/2 the size of a clenched fist is what I'm saying). They are roughly spherical with a greater structural integrity than dungeon slimes but nowhere near rigid.
Ryan Morris
>outsiders >from inside
Nolan Phillips
That's a cool idea. Maybe they could feed off metal, which is why people throw coins into wells.
Benjamin Peterson
Inventing monsters is one of my favorite hobbies, and the things I create fall into varying degrees of compatibility with standard fantasy fare. Here are a couple:
>Chiming Wheel A floating circle of metal with spokes of light in the center, about the diameter of a soccer ball. It creates a soothing sound which lulls its victims into an unresponsive, but still standing and awake, state. It then attempts to encircle the head and deal INT/WIS damage to them.
>Floorworlders Imagine there is an alternate world inside of solid objects, one which has gravity upside down so that the ground is also their ground, but they are upside down. Now, imagine you can see a hazy image of the inhabitants of said world when you look at the ground where they are--almost as if the ground is frosted glass, but you can still see the surface of things and it actually kind of hurts to look at and try to process two realities at once. And finally, imagine that these alternate world people can dig into the ground on their side, causing material to build up on our side of the ground, and they can place things in the ground in order to make holes, etc. You're walking in a dungeon and suddenly you see the hazy form of a floorworlder. It's holding something, you can't tell what, and then suddenly it jams the thing it's holding into the ground and the stone floor seems to grow a shovelhead-shaped protrusion. Soon, more stone grows out of the floor, and suddenly you feel the floor beneath you fall about the same amount as the floor ahead rose. You turn to run, but it's dark, and you trip. As you lay on the floor, you see a stone tip of a sword blade jut out of the ground, mere inches from your face. etc. etc. I got tired of writing this.
Anyway, when thinking up homebrew monsters, I try to focus on a single thing. A simple concept, a particular shape, a role that I feel needs to be filled, anything. From there, I just build on that concept until I have something workable.
David Bailey
Please dump as many as you can while I struggle to come up with one decent idea
Jaxson Gutierrez
Alright, alright, here's another. I'd not sure what exactly to call it yet, but here's one I came up with the other day. Imagine a being with the head of an antelope, but with a single horn and the top half of its head except the part connected to the horn are gone. Basically, the lower jaw, back of the skull, and ears. Above the open lower jaw, a single, large eye floats. Coming down off the back of the head is a flexible band of flesh, almost like a flat spine, but down the front of the creature instead of forming the back, Curved bones jut from it, like a ribcage, and there are shoulderblades there as well. It has only front legs, and while the upper portion of the leg is fleshy, the feet and the portion attached directly to the feet, the "forearm" portion, is made of narrow, black wires, forming the outline of what the foreleg should be from the side, and the wire curls into a spiral inside the outline. The back half of the creature is like a fat snake tail which becomes more solid towards the end. It seems impossible to discern where the back half of the creature begins because of how immaterial it seems at that point. Turning our attention now to behavior, it perceives the physical world as unreal, almost like a conversation had while half-asleep, and words and ideas are what is real to it. Near the creature, the world seems to come apart. When it speaks, devastation and prosperity merge into one and pass about the land. The poetry of existence is its sustenance, and its undoing.
Lincoln Morales
Mimic WORLD
Isaac Ortiz
I liked one a heard a long time ago >Coin Mimic Looks like an unassuming coin that eats other forms of currency, and other such valuable trading assets like gold shavings or precious stones. It has an inexplicable sense of current market value, and can be used by merchants to quickly determine the value of trading currencies
Julian Wood
Arcane Blob
Creatures formed from occult and arcane run off of spells, rituals, excess energies or by-products of channeling mana or other such sources of power. Essentially, spontaneously manifesting magical maggots, like how people used to believe maggots just came out of flesh for no reason. They tend to infest places where wizards and other magic users called home, like dungeons, abandoned mage towers, cultist lairs, etc and formed over a period of time. They don't seem have much of any intelligence and are just floating spell factories. They tend to stick in big, loose groups and aimlessly wander a given area. They seek out sources of magic in that area or that come into the area and sort of just stay near them, probably feeding off the magical run off. However, if threatened or thwarted from feeding off a source, they attack in a group and can be overwhelming.
They resemble floating uneven spheres, organic and fleshy looking and can come in a variety of colours. They consist of what seems to be some kind of mush - they aren't perfectly solid, but retain shape no problem. They are wholly unadorned, with no eyes or sensory organs apart from a single tentacle of varying length. With this tentacle, Arcane Blobs can cast a single spell, typically an offensive spell, like a fireball, dart of arcane energy, arc of lightning, icicles, energy beams and more. Some cast defensive spells like shields or move through walls - these are essentially totally harmless as they cannot really hurt an attacker, but can inadvertently protect an offensive Arcane Blob. Some Arcane Blobs are blessed with trickier powers and have been known to be able to summon lesser monsters to fight for them. As Arcane Blobs have no intelligence to speak of, summoned monsters are wild and unbound, attacking even the blob. Arcane Blobs don't seem to be able to pool spell-casting resources to cast bigger spells.
Jacob Kelly
Cool idea. That's proper wizard's tower vermin.
What about moss that travels around the floor looking for spaces where potions have been spilt?
That would make sense, and they would sustain themselves in pools by consuming natural dissolved and particulate metals.
Logan Nguyen
I had an idea for a type of blob that in its resting state looks like a pane of glass, and can hide in place of a window, but when it wakes up it becomes a blob of white-hot melted glass.
It can't properly be harmed in its moving state, but if cooled to its solid form or attacked while asleep, it shatters like regular glass.
Alexander Flores
>What about moss that travels around the floor looking for spaces where potions have been spilt?
I like that, either growing from the spills or seeking them out. Maybe both, Alchemist's Fungus and Alchemist's Creepers. Wizard towers could be host to entire isolated, esoteric ecosystems of arcane by-products.
The brownish Fungus grows and propagates around spills of potions from wandering spores, releasing protective clouds of different spores which expand rapidly and form dangerous arcs of energy within. Inhalation of spores isn't advised, but it isn't necessarily terribly dangerous. Might get a cough out of it. Might even belch lightning once or twice. It can be a hazard if left to grow, but if cultured, in a controlled area, can be used to harvest energy from the clouds.
The Moss, or Creeper, forms from spilled potions, too, and generally existed in some slight, unnoticeable form beforehand. As it grows, the moist, spongy material actively seeks out alchemical liquids and materials to absorb. It's tough, thick and almost rubbery. It is a creeping fermentation of every spill it soaks up and as such can be terribly unstable if damaged, which apart from its general physical toughness, is its main defense, releasing searing spurts or paralyzing bursts of liquid and other noxious fumes. The moss is black and rich green in colour and moves at an alarming rate should it detect a spill near it.
Jeremiah Hughes
>That would make sense, and they would sustain themselves in pools by consuming natural dissolved and particulate metals. That definitely works for underground rivers and cave systems. They could wash into a well from there which is how the whole thing works.
Adam Powell
bump
Sebastian Collins
I've got a handful of these lying around that I'll post when I get home
Cooper King
Sure, might as well. We are currently running a campaign that mixes tech and magic. My players just fled a relatively peaceful area after making quite a ruckus and fled to the frontier (aka the Wild West)
One of the creatures I created for the area are rust wurms. I figured every desert style area regardless if endless sand or arid flatstone needed some kind of giant worm creature. Our variant is a little different though.
The rust wurms are gargantuan creatures composed entirely of heaps of scrap metal formed into something roughly wormed shape. Imagine shards of rusted metal, bits of shrapnel, all sorts of blades being held together by magnetic force. Their mouths are pits of whirling metal, ready to devour anything unfortunate of getting in its way.
The creatures aren't new to the area, despite only being spotted recently. They are actually element beings that create their bodies with magnetic forces. They are quite small and their bodies used to match, that is until those pesky magitech corporations started spreading into the area and constructing railroads. Now the elementals have much more scrap to make their bodies from, including train carts themselves, making for some impressively long worms. The creatures aren't terribly bright, existing only to add to its body and cause a terrible ruckus.
Austin Martinez
Not a creature per say, but still
>Steelwool A rare plant found in the depths of earth. It hardens as time passes, as such, only the young saplings can be harvested, many tried to use its solidity to make weapon and armours, without success. It is still very valuable as an alchemical ingredient.
Christian Lee
>Ground Vulture This beast has the head of a vulture and the body of a mangy dog. Ground vultures are known to follow adventurers to feast upon whatever corpses they leave in their path. Adventurers followed by ground vultures take a -5 penalty to diplomacy checks, and a +5 bonus to intimidate checks.
Jordan Russell
Bump
Daniel Flores
Bump
Nolan Perez
Could bump with OC you know
Josiah Allen
I've always felt Morlocks should be used more. A good alternative to orcs and goblins, since they seem very much to be defined in people's minds. But Morlocks are much less so. Subhuman, subterranean, but they have machinery. I think they could potentially be put to good use as an insidious threat that is as brutish as it is cunning.
Christopher Wright
I use them as essentially evil dwarves with much more crude technology. Paranoid and warlike, I always have them invading from deep within the knolls and mountains
James Bell
I tried to create a few of these, including mammoths made small due to island pygmyism, Pistol Shrimp that live in hordes of hundreds, and giant eagles with two meter wingspans.
Turns out all three of those are or were real.
Kevin Jones
Sanguine Marionette Created in areas of high concentrations of negative energy. They hide within the host corpse that created them. When a living creature that is wounded passes by it slithers out and forces it's way into the living creature through the wound. It then slowly starts to take control of it's host, driving it to suicidal acts as it slowly converts the living target's blood into more sanguine marionettes. When not hidden in the host it looks like a puddle of congealed blood. If the infestation lasts to long the host will die from lack of blood and a small brood of the creatures lie in wait for the unfortunate.
Anthony Scott
>Outsiders from HERE.
That makes no fucking sense you dumb nigger.
Explain in a clear and logical manner, because you have my attention. This is literally fucking me up mentally.
John Mitchell
> What about: >Giant land shrimp
A 10 - 20ft long shrimp that comes onto land to shake the trunks of fruit trees and eat the fruit that fall off. It can move fast but, due to its very large size and rigid body, has poor mobility when in thick jungle. It is thought to be a herbivore, at least when on land.
>Wandering Roots clumps of earth held in knots of roots, ancient things
>Flying eels Float using gas bladders, hunt by dropping onto prey, biting and strangling it, and slithering away to refill their bladders. They rest under eaves of houses, and are a huge fire hazard
>fireproof salamanders. They secrete a heavily flammable mucous/oil and have flame retardant skin. People keep them in jars as living torches, harvest the mucous, and blacksmiths have gloves and aprons made of salamander hide
>dart shooting plants An unfortunate hybrid whose fruit, when ripe, is like a grenade. It's covered in spiky seeds that double as thorns, and explodes when struck or jarred. Indigenous people know not to enter the jungle when they're ripe, as setting one off has a nasty habit of causing a chain reaction
>Mammalian silk maker Tarsier-like insectivores. Started off as scent glands on the elbows, the silk they make is very cohesive . Long fingers except for the pinkies, which they hook the strands around to keep it handy. They make homes, traps, clothes, use them for travel. Waiting in their traps, they look like they're praying/prostrating, laying with their arms splayed in front of them. Their the main predators of the Pixie analogs I have
Eli Anderson
Also, I've been playing around with the idea that humans are genetically unstable/have been experimented on and that's where all of these weird hybrids like mermaids and werewolves come from
Ethan Sanchez
>Treacle bees Bees that make treacle instead of honey. Magic, that's why. Blame the wizards.
Kayden Adams
I like the idea that mimics have a coin larval form. Unlike the coin mimic they don't eat coins, they just look like them and lay dormant like this for years. Basically when an adult mimic gets killed and get looted mimic larvae enter circulation. Most of them die, but the few that do reach dungeons via adventurers escape and spend their time eating detritus and dungeon vermin. Eventually they undergo metamorphosis into a blob before turning into the chest adult form.
Ryan Robinson
>Manfleas Large fleas that release an irritating material with their bite, causing itchy rashes and slight bleeding on their victims. Unlike most fleas, they can survive off of humans due to the amount of blood they can extract. Many locations are infested with manfleas, unable to eradicate them as they have already spread to every house. Certain powders can be rubbed on the skin and around a room to kill any small insects that cross it, and this powder has become a valuable commodity.
Justin Miller
Not my idea, but I read once about an obscure Japanese monster that's basically a vampiric tree. It gets created when a tree siphons lots of blood due to growing on the site of a bloody battlefield. Eventually it starts to actively suck out blood by using its branches to trap and drain victims of their blood.
I thought it was pretty cool.
Grayson Campbell
Dust bunnies that are bunnies made out of dust
Eli Butler
I was really expecting this at the bonfire after the Dragonslayer's armor.
Kinda disappointed
Eli Jackson
like that one Rugrats episode? Those things were creepy
