I'm bored and got time to kill, and also like merfolk and sea monsters, so I'm going to dump what I've got. I don't really have much regular merfolk, though, so if you've got any, post em.
Also I might provide random facts about sea creatures while I'm at it.
Anybody actually used merfolk and other aquatic creatures in your games? They seem rather underused on the tabletop, despite showing up in many myths and stories.
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> leviathan merfolk
oh dear
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Some user started drawing this in the second to last deep sea critter thread I made. Thread died before he finished it, though.
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> want merfolk in my setting
> don't want them to be ladies with dolphin tails
> don't want them to be lovecraft's ugly-ass fishdudes either
Is there a middle ground? I want them to be noticeably different, but still look cool and not, you know, cthulhu's cousin.
I like this artist's stuff. She's (I'm pretty sure the artist was a woman) has managed to incorporate most of the weird traits for the fish in question.
I kind of wanted to do something similar myself, but my limited drawing skills meant I had to take a very different approach.
This would be a good poitn to drop some information, since the fish this one's based on is very interesting. It's one of the few animals that can produce red bioluminesence. Red light is the first spectrum of light to be absorbed by water, so most deep sea fish can't even see red. The stoplight loosejaw, however can, so it has a personal spotlight that's invisible to practically all other fish it shares its environment with, letting it light up its surrondings while remaining hidden.
Also, the lower jaw is on a hing that allows it to spring forward and impale prey.
Working on an aquatic PC race. Essentially a combination of merfolk and oread. They'd be the "humans of the sea", clearly common as mud but not overpowered as oreads or merfolk can be.
Here's the actual fish doing the weird thing with its jaws, because there's no way I could properly describe how it works.
I prefer ones that don't have an obvious disconnect between the fish part and woman part. i.e. the upper body is also scaled, or coloured in the same way as the lower part. Like one in Also have some "not Lovecraftian ugly but not just a broad with a fish tail glued on" look.
Aren't Tritons and sea elves already pretty much that? Sea elves are literally "elves but underwater", which would probably be reasonably close to "humans of the sea" (since elves and humans aren't all that different statwise).
One of my favourite animals, and one of the most bizarre deep sea fish. This one doesn't quite do justise how weird the head of a gulper eel actually is, but you can't really represent it and keep the head at least roughly human.
In actual gulper eel, the skull is stretched "backwards", i.e. the neurocranium is absolutely tine, but there's two ridiculously long jawbones that project backwards from it to form the upper jaw, and then the lower jaw bones attach to thow and curve back forward to meet under the neurocranium.
Cookie cutter shark, probably the only deep sea fish that's known to cause harm to humans, by damaging fragile sensor systems in submarines by biting them. They rise closer to surface at night, and I think there's been some cases of them biting divers. Their normal method of feeding is using their oversized teeth to scoop out a bite from a passing whale, shark, or another bit marine animal ("icecream scoop shark" would really be a more accurate name than cookie cutter shark).
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Here's some weird fish-people.
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I'm running out of deep sea merfolk, so I'll finish with the stuff I've made and then move to sea monsters (and probably actual deep sea fish, since they're mosntrous enough to pass as fantasy sea monsters).
I can't actually draw very well, but I know a lot of random trivia about deep sea fish, so I just did some sketches of horrible deep sea mermaids doing horrible deep sea things to illustrate random deep sea fish trivia.
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I love the concept, but using water based creatures involves water based combat, which is difficult to run for everybody.
I can see it working if you do a whole campaign based underwater, but it would still be difficult to do
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Moving on to sea monsters.
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That's all sea monsters I have, unless giant squid counts.
I like these kinds of oldschool illustrations. Also, "Lantern-Bearing Sea Devils from Station 74" needs to be a B-grade scifi movie.
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I used this one as a reference for The black swallower really is a horrible vore-fish. Well, most deep sea fish are. It's kind of their thing.
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Giant ostracod. Giant is a relative term (for an ostracod that really is enormously huge). For some reason invertebrates in the deep sea often grow huge (see all giant squid and giant isopods).
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>Tritons and elves
Meh, I'm a wee bit tired of elves. Unless they're fat buffoons like Dr. Robotnik, then their attitudes become hilarious.
It's really fucking weird how this strange and well-drawn monster is far less strange and imaginative than actual things that live in the deep sea posted elsewhere in the thread. This thing is familiar and uninspired in comparison to reality.
Probably the only picture that shows significant amount of known gulper eel species (and the pelican eel, which is a different genus) in one picture, and also identifies them (although annoyingly only in the image description). They tend to be pretty similar (which is why exact number os species is somewhat disputed), although they look horrible in subtly different ways.
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I find that happens a lot. Imaginary creatures are ultimately limited by what people can imagine, which for most people isn't all that much when you get down to it. Hence 90% of fantasy critters are some variant of "creature A with body parts from creature B, plus it breathes fire or something".
Nature, on the other hand, is limited only by the laws of physics and biology, and you can do suprisingly much within those limits.
Deep sea fish tend to be extra weird due to the extreme environment that requires very specialized adaptions, plus the environment being relatively stable and isolated, giving species plenty of time to diverge.
Random fact I've recently learned is that gulper eels not only look bizarre, they also differ from all other vertebrates in how their genes are arranged. I don't really know anything about molecular biology, but apparently all vertebrates have their genes generally arranged in a certain order in their genome. Except with gulper- and pelican eels a big chunk of the genome in their last common ancestor apparently underwent a spontaneous large-scale mutation and inverted its order, and since this apparently didn't affect the viability of the animal, it's stayed that way ever since.
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I made these for one of the previous thread based on some user's idea. They're probably the only thing I've made that other people have saved and reposted.
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Remaining numbers are just random doodles and not really worth posting. I should probably make more of these, but I'm lacking good ideas (I can't really think of much situations a horrible deep sea adventure party could run into).
Best mermaids coming through
I fucking loves these, please just take any Veeky Forums story that's even remotely humorous and do more of these
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hell yeah I loved these designs so much. And the action scenes. Really every component of this show was perfect which is why it was so upsetting that the anime somehow turned out to be absolute studio-bombing shit
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I once played a Liverpudlian Leviathan in a Leviathan the Tempest game, who had a mermaid minion.
Shit was pretty great.
I'll share some deep sea stuff.
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Welp. I know what my setting's marine goblins will have for mounts.
>Random fact I've recently learned is that gulper eels not only look bizarre, they also differ from all other vertebrates in how their genes are arranged. I don't really know anything about molecular biology, but apparently all vertebrates have their genes generally arranged in a certain order in their genome. Except with gulper- and pelican eels a big chunk of the genome in their last common ancestor apparently underwent a spontaneous large-scale mutation and inverted its order, and since this apparently didn't affect the viability of the animal, it's stayed that way ever since.
Not all their genes. There's a specific subset of developmental genes, Hox genes, which control segment polarity (IIRC) in animal development and are arranged in a particular order ("Hox colinearity"). When I last looked at this, we didn't know what caused this, but since then I think I've heard of some structural explanation (i.e., it has something to do with the 3D structure of the gene regions complexed with whatever regulatory factors are involved in their expression). This is a pretty strongly conserved phenomenon, so if it's inverted in gulper eels, that's interesting news.
It's hard to find masculine mermen art. Also, should merpeople and sharkfolk always be enemies?
I found it more fun, at least for my setting, that the shark people and merfolk are only enemies on a tribe by tribe basis. But at the same time, I have mixed aquatic race settlements too, so you'd find tritons, merfolk, cecaelia, sea elves, and a few other races all living in the same underwater villages, and working together.
Alas I don't have any good pictures on hand. But I did use a merfolk race once. They lived in a specific atoll isolated from the world. Fearful of the great water beyond.
Source?
If i could find it with with image search so can you. I'll give you a hint. Gonzo.
Blue Submarine 9, I think it's called.