Huzzah !

“And so all those stories that you would have my biographer tally as courage…It’s all vanity. It always has been. And we are at the end of vanity.”

“Then you are free. Mine your courage from a different lode now. Friendship. Brotherhood.”

Image © TSR, inc.

[Commissioned by @crazytrain48​, who requested I merge two scorpion/spider hybrid monsters, the cildabrin from D&D and the grey horror from the Arduin Grimoire, into a single creature. I went back to the first image, from the Forgotten Realms Monstrous Compendium Volume II, for the cildabrin. Every other piece of art for either monster just looked like a scorpion with more or less wonky proportions, rather than actually incorporating any spider anatomy. In D&D 3.5’s Lords of Madness, the cildabrin is an aberration, but I don’t know why (other than to justify its inclusion in a book about aberrations). It’s a hybrid of two animals, but smarter and with a few magic powers, clearly a magical beast by that generation’s organizational system.]

Cildabrin CR 8 NE Magical Beast This horrific beast resembles a cross between a tarantula and a scorpion—it has the jaws and furry body of the former, but the pincers and stinging tail of the latter.

Cildabrins are Darklands predators that appear as hybrids of different types of arachnids. Despite their monstrous appearance, they are of human intelligence and gifted with magic. They tend to worship powers of darkness and monstrosity, and holy glyphs and sacrificial altars can be found near a cildabrin’s lair. They have no interest in treasure, except as bait for future meals.

A cildabrin is a wandering predator, but when it finds evidence of prey sets up an ambush. It cloaks its approach with darkness and silence spells, and often attacks at a choke point warded by spike stones. Their venom is a potent paralytic, and they may grab and retreat with a creature rendered immobile but still alive. This they devour at their leisure after dragging it into a sheltered cave. Cildabrins move at ease in three dimensions, and often attack near terrain hazards like cliffs, pits or spider holes.

A cildabrin speaks Undercommon, but rarely does. Many inexperienced travelers believe cildabrins to be unintelligent beasts, which they call grey horrors. “Cildabrin” is the name they give themselves. Cildabrins are fond of the flesh of dwarves and giant spiders, and eat both above other prey sources. They are dark grey in color, with blue and black highlights.

Image by Thomas Baxa, © TSR Inc.

[A monster I had never heard of until reading through Dark Sun monster books, as it never appeared anywhere besides Terrors Beyond Tyr. Which is a shame, because it is completely my jam. The art seems to be the result of confusion between Baxa and the art director. The text describes a cross between a fly and a tick, not a flea, and its abilities involve turning parts of its body into humanoid chunks, which is not illustrated. Maybe that’s supposed to be suggested by the image of a fly on one wing and a man on the other? I dunno what that’s about.]

Pakubrazi CR 6 CE Aberration This creature resembles a humanoid flea with four membranous wings. Its arms and legs are heavily muscled at the base, bend oddly and end in surprisingly delicate hands and feet.

A pakubrazi is a parasite of civilization, making hit and run attacks to drain humanoids of their blood. Although they can survive on animal blood, they find it flavorless and unsatisfying, and so go out of their way to taste as many different kinds of people as possible. Pakubrazi occasionally work together, and may even go undercover as a family or business in order to lure in victims.

Their natural weapons are surprisingly delicate for the monster’s size, but then, a pakubrazi rarely intends to kill its prey, instead drinking their blood and leaving them to recover so it can feed again. Most pakubrazi carry weapons in case they do intend to deal permanent damage. A pakubrazi can shapeshift its body in pieces, creating a hideous hybrid form, with its head temporarily human, or wings and feelers bursting from a seemingly normal elven body. This spectacle is distracting and disgusting, but does interfere with the monster’s ability to hold onto prey. If working in groups, typically one pakubrazi will engage in this flashing form to weaken enemies while its allies feed, and then switch off after a few rounds of draining blood.

The most sinister aspect of a pakubrazi is their ability to curse humanoid creatures. A pakubrazi may lay this curse on an unconscious survivor of their feeding, or may spread the curse simply by brushing up against a passer-by while disguised as a humanoid. A creature cursed by a pakubrazi loses control of its mind and body when threatened or stressed, transforming into a pakubrazi-like monster and lashing out at its allies with insect-like claws and mouthparts. In combination with a pakubrazi’s own ability to change only parts of its form, it can be very confusing to determine who is one of the monsters and who is one of their victims. A town can tear itself apart with paranoia attempting to root out the shapeshifter, whereupon most pakubrazi will take their leave and move to another settlement.

A pakubrazi is about ten feet tall in its natural form. They are ungainly fliers, and usually prefer to remain on the ground unless they need to make a quick getaway.

DnDoggos - #202 “Plentiful Plans”

It turns out making AI-illustrated sea shanties is a lot of fun.

I give you “Ten Thousand Miles Away,” as sung by Stephen Ware and illustrated by CLIP+FFT.

It crams each illustration full of detail, trying to interpret each line as strongly as it possibly can. It gets several tries at the chorus line “I’ll stay no more on England’s shore” and in each attempt it tries waves, rows of cottages, union jacks, ships, wistful figures on the seashore, wistful figures wearing felt hats, wistful figures with Beatles haircuts, and the occasional crowd of redcoat soldiers.

The illustrations for “And sing blow, ye bully boys, blow” are hilarious, as people wearing mean-kid haircuts and private school uniforms croon into microphones. (It’s going with the modern meaning of “bully” I guess.)

I also have been dying to illustrate Barrett’s Privateers, a Canadian classic, and Stephen Ware provided a version of this, too.

I think I’m most impressed by CLIP+FFT’s rendition of “Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax Pier”, atmospheric, rainy, and containing several prominent Halifax scenes.

Then sebastian büttrich sent me a doom metal version of Barrett’s Privateers, which was something I was definitely not expecting. I experimented with ways to get CLIP+FFT to produce more doom metal-appropriate illustrations, and the thing that worked best was simply to append “+ darkness” to the end of each line.

It changed the illustrations DRAMATICALLY. Here’s “How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now”, then “How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now + darkness”.

It really leans into “For the scummiest vessel I’d ever seen”.

Also twitter user bagofmoons sent me a clean, nearly a cappella version of Barrett’s Privateers, so I decided to see what would happen if I ran the recording through a speech to text transcription program. It turns out that singing REALLY throws off the transcription. The only line that it consistently gets is “God damn them all” and even then it will sometimes read it as “God damn them ball” or even “God damn the mall”.

Here’s the full version.

I think my favorite misheard lyric illustration is “On the King’s birthday we put to sea” mistranscribed as “On the King’s birthday we put the CD.” There’s the CD, dutifully put front and center in the king’s birthday party.