Interesting monsters

fuck stats, body horror is the best horror.

>never wear armor

For some reason these things naked makes them much more unsettling.

>Mates for Life
Do real world animal mate for life? I heard something about crows.
But I'm unsure what happens when the partner dies.

A few of them supposedly do. then again, some are actually homosexual, so there you go.

the long poem thing is neat. Actually I would have made them CARVE the poem instead of leaving chemicals but whatever.

Posting an abomiantion.
Beholders and mindlfayers are iconic, but what are some abominations that can rival them in their weirdness?

I always loved Vitreous Drinkers back from MMIV. 3.5e had a ton of really weird fun undead, and these guys were great. Hunched, eyeball-covered corpses with lots of blinding spells and the ability to steal sight with a touch of their tongue, the also had 18 int and the power to summon spectral ravens to act as spies. The book even had a great idea of using them as spymasters, considering that the stolen sight is actually them taking control of a person's optics to see out of their eyes instead of that person.

Also they eat eyeballs, in case they weren't great enough. Now I want to make the spymaster of a city just this horrific undead monster sitting at its desk with a bowl full of eyes for snacking on as it organizes espionage around the city.

I like it. Stuff relates to body subsets is really efficient.
Vampires got up on that blood thing.

Time ago I wanted to create a teeth centered monster but nothing original came to mind.

Do you have more interesting undeads to post? Possibly some higher ones like Drinkers that can be a Ravenloft Dark Lord.

Because it's one of those silly fun monsters that draw a lot of criticism from plebeians who hate anything that isn't "epic" and generic so they were given the cold shoulder for a long time, eventually people started to get sick of the sheepish general aversion towards silly monsters and the pendulum swung back so now they are pretty popular.

Oh man, there was a ton. First that comes to mind though for me is the Ulgurstasta. Created by the necromancer-demigod Kyuss, they're basically skeleton factories. They eat people, dissolve their flesh, and create an animated skeleton as a minion. However, in a twist of magic that Kyuss didn't forsee, the Urlgurstasta also drains some of the memories and intelligence of the things it killls and devours, slowly growing in intellectual capacity and gaining the ability to have other drives besides its nature as a skeleton factory.

As for teeth centered, I'd always go with some strange variation of Tooth Faries, ala Guillermo del Toro myself. Maybe some kind of fey-resembling creature that collects teeth to etch spells on, wearing scale-mail armor of stolen teeth pried from people's jaws?

Just wrote this

A blooming flower using green tendrils to move and a small fire burning at the flowers center.
If the fire dies out the creature dies with it. The fire is what keeps it alive as well as acting as the brain for its thought process. The creature needs to move around continuously in order to find things it can feed to the fire.

Those things are literally just downgraded versions of some big boys in the Epic Level Handbook. They're even referenced in the last sentence of the flavor text you linked.

>Epic Level Handbook
I never read as people say bad things about it. Mostly saying it is unbalanced. s the lore good?

I remember reading someone's homebrew setting where body-horror/bioweapons were commonplace in a medieval setting.

They'd release spiders into a siege that would find sleeping people and use their excess skin to weave them into a meatweb that wouldn't do any physical harm (beyond the obvious) but would restrain them inside their own fucking skin.

Shit was metal as fuck.

Tome of Magic had the Tooth Beast, they are what happens when Dahlver-Nar (the teeth vestige) bleeds into reality, they emit a horrible moan instead of roaring and can sense fear.

>They'd release spiders into a siege that would find sleeping people and use their excess skin to weave them into a meatweb that wouldn't do any physical harm (beyond the obvious) but would restrain them inside their own fucking skin.

this resembles a lot the webfiction "twig".
A biopunk in dysstopic 1918. I liked a lto the setting but unfortunately author spend too much time on character inner thoughts. But monsters were cool.
Like a pair of twin sisters that had a couple of smaller twin sisters grafted inside them to use as attack pets.

Anything that has to do with amphibians is good.

I also really liked Desiccators, which were the dried-out husks of water elementals bound into undead form, and with a desperate need to quench their dryness by draining the vital fluids from living creatures. They have the ability to breathe out cones of desiccating air and their touch saps water from someone on contact, causing fatigue and CON damage.

They also hate everything, because they used to be water elementals, but now they're just salty

And now it is time for undead fore elementals that can no longer feel the heat and want to set everything on fire.

Corrupting entire nation nation in order to make a giant bonfire of its ruins. And still don't feel a thing.

*fire elementals

Besides jokes i really liked the undeads you posted.

If following the same method as the desiccators, they would also drain heat with a touch, meaning that they effectively turn things into ice and flash-freeze people by draining all of their body heat. But, since cold shit is endothermic it too would drain heat from the environment, meaning that they would hate cold stuff with a passion as it drains precious heat that they want. Their lairs would be filled with shattered corpses of frozen victims, and heatless flames.

Char-basaur

The Epic Level Handbook kind of flip-flops between "interesting lore ideas" and "man what the fuck is a Prismatic Dragon". Still, worth a look-through. I always thought the concept behind Atropals (stillborn godlings who spontaneously reanimate as reality warping corpse babies) was pretty cool.

What is this called? Looks alien/funky.

Are there any sort of monsters that can have a parasitic effect on a PC long after the party has finished fighting them? Something with long term effects that need to be cured?

Mu Spore. Humungous, mobile, carnivorous, world ending fungus.

Quite a few animals mate for life, mostly birds and animals that live in harsh regions such as the Poles. However, given Nature's pragmatic approach to most things, these life pairings tend to have their weird little twists. Most birds practice social monogamy, where they'll stick to one partner but also impregnate/get impregnated by other birds. This is a form of back-up: while the life pair takes care of each other and their brood, they also "spread their genes around" in case either partner is infertile or if they are unsuccessful at raising their offspring. Some mammal species, I think dormice or praire dogs, are instead extremely social and promiscuous as juveniles, but hormonal changes causes them to become extremely aggressive towards anyone that isn't their mate once they pair-bond and "settle down".

Eusocial insects can do it too, with termites pairing up and taking care of their offspring in equal shares. Most of their monogamous pairings tend to end quite violently after about 20 years, so many termites end up as "divorcees" at some point in their lives. Termites also tend to be a considerable exception to most things in the Animal Kingdom, so don't take them as a representative example.

No, that's Ityak-Ortheel.

The only horror creature able to compete with vampire and werewolves.

This race was inspired by a schizophrenic's rantings in the forties. It was called the Shaver Mystery.

...

Looked up the image on reddit and found a version with lore, probably going to use this in my game at some point

I always liked these guys, even though they're relatively simple. Just the idea of a kind of menial golem that ends up being still a potent danger to an adventuring party, like running into an automated trash compactor that thinks you're garbage. It just sees the party and goes "oh look, more corpses. Weird that they're moving. Eh."

Plus you can make it do wrestling moves.

Check out Dragonmech for 3.5. Had a lot of creatures related to/from the moon.

I too read Arnold's blog

I thought i was insane and was the only person who knew about dragon mech this isnt from there but I imagine something like this from the moon.

It's an underrated setting that really is done a disservice by being among the 3rd party OGL slop. Also can't go wrong with the classic moon monster

Its surprisingly good especially for containing steam powered items and mechs which
most would assume would just shit up a setting.

what is this from, exactly?

Veins of the Earth, an Old-school RPG setting about nightmarish underground exploration. It's got some cool stuff in it.

This is one of the saddest things I have read.

>making Derro attractive

I'm not going to tell other people how to have fun but this is fucking official art.

Epic handbook is pretty wacky.

That's not the Epic Level Handbook, though it is wacky.

This is the sample prismatic dragon statblock.
Sample Prismatic Dragon, Old
Size/Type: Colossal Dragon (Light)
Hit Dice: 58d12+1,102 (1,479 hp hp)
Initiative: +4 (Improved Initiative)
Speed: 60 ft., fly 300 ft. (clumsy)
Armor Class: 78 (–8 size, +19 deflection, +57 natural), touch +58, flat-footed +97
Base Attack/Grapple: +58/+97
Attack: Bite +74 (4d8+23/19-20) melee
Full Attack: Bite +74 melee, 2 claws +69 (4d6+11) melee, 2 wings +68 (2d8+11) melee, tail slap +69 (4d6+34) melee
Space/Reach: 30 ft./20 ft
Special Attacks: Crush 4d8+34 (DC 58), tail sweep 2d8+34 (DC 58), breath weapon, Frightful Presence (DC 58), spells (caster level 26th), spell-like abilities
Special Qualities: Immunities, DR 20/epic, SR 66, Blindsight, keen senses, deflecting force
Saves: Fort +50, Ref +31, Will +50
Abilities: Str 57, Dex 10, Con 49, Int 48, Wis 49, Cha 48
Skills: Balance +67, Bluff +80, Climb +84, Concentration +80, Diplomacy +92, Disable Device +80, Escape Artist +61, Gather Information +86, Heal +80, Intimidate +86, Jump +102, Knowledge (all) +80, Listen +80, Move Silently +61, Open Lock +61, Perform (any two) +80, Search +80, Sense Motive +80, Spellcraft +86, Spot +80, Survival +80, Tumble +67, Use Magic Device +80
Feats: Blinding Speed (×2), Cleave, Flyby Attack, Great Cleave, Improved Critical (bite), Improved Initiative, Improved Sunder, Improved Spell Capacity (9th), Improved Spell Capacity (9th), Power Attack, Quicken Spell-Like Ability, Snatch, Spell Knowledge (×4), Weapon Focus (bite), Weapon Focus (claw), Weapon Focus (tail slap)

Just why.