#chonchon

Chonchon

Some sorcerers care little for unholy realms or undead forms, seeking power instead in the whims of cruel chaos. This ominous owl-winged head is all that remains of a former archmage: it delights in spreading misfortune and drinking blood in its new airborne form.

The penultimate dungeon branch, The Depths, was made over a decade ago to try and present a more obviously dramatic difficulty spike before the Realm of Zot, and there wasn't a lot of attempts at trying to make a lump of generic dungeon monsters half-established two decades ago have much thematic cohesion. These Chilean bloodsucking heads are naturally trying to link together some of those highly scattered denizens in our prefab level pieces:

Flightless fae Spriggans, who represent a fast-moving and very frail player species in their own underworld-forested-fortresses but don't really use much for clever fairy tricks,

More anthro takes on Tengu, another player species of sword-and-sorcery birdfolk mages who are somewhat lost from mountain homes aside from the presence of some other hyper-dangerous bird swarms,

Vampires, a former player species (and now a current player transformation state) who get the standard unholy dangers in with high-level magic and accompanying thralls,

and Ugly Things, a set of generic fleshcrafted horrors linking colour-coding elements to chaos by changing one anothers' elements with their own radioactive presence. (There's also a kobold fleshcrafting mage represented above that's quite new- it might get its own entry later.)

As such, chonchon serve as fast vampiric-but-alive human-bird hybrids who use chaotic debuffing melee and repositioning wind magic to harass their foes, which reasonably matches the mythological brief. While they don't explicitly connect these given disparate myths + OC dungeon fodder, they fit naturally alongside the each of them in the ever-cosmopolitan state fantasy game settings invoke. They're not very sturdy, but they do have vampiric bites, and provide some wonderfully awful support capacities for other dangerous monsters.

(Tiles-wise, they combine CC0 scraps of Surt- the faces of some generic modern solidiers, to be more specific- with griffon wings and raven talons by our original main artist multiple decades ago, Denzi. I would have liked to put together something clearly flying with its ears, like in SMT's sadly neglected art or A Book of Creature's, but this particular rendition ended up still standing out pretty dramatically for a higher-resolution jarringly-placid human face than nearly anything gets in our 32x32 confines, alongside the dancing sparkles.)

Bes kemwar

A minor hairy maggot spirit, phasing in and out of this plane. Each regional variant inflicts different minor ailments: the ones found in the Dungeon cause one's magic to grow weak.

On the other end of the game, multiple needs presented themselves:

In some heavy reworking of other features, we ended up adding a simple "diminished spells" status to let the above demonic-mutating Zykzyls cast the high-level hex Enfeeble. Since that spell can apply multiple other statuses simultaneously, it'd be good to have another home just for that.

Our undead crusader god (rewritten to be a fallen jailer of the heavens), Yredelemnul, provides some temporary undead allies when their worshippers Raise The Black Torch and attempt to conquer each floor in Yred's name. There's not a lot of non-derived / template undead available early on, though, so low-level worshippers most notably get a lot of power in wight bands or ever-swarming marrowcuda, alongside a generic necrophage we've been trying to phase out for lack of a good gimmick.

With the many, many different illnesses this bes can inflict, it seemed reasonable as a way to combine the two needs and thus get a weakling undead that can inflict any given debuff. They rarely show up accompanying the relatively-generic-but-mechanically-distinct phantoms, jellies, or walking sleepcaps in early D as a regular encounter, and give another potential summon for fledgling torchbearers of The Fallen. They're mostly statted as fodder in both cases, but low-level fantasy foes should be a little more iconic than just goblins and rats and bandits and skeletons forever, right?

(The tile was made by altering a highly-spectral old hungry ghost tile by ploomutoo and mixing it with old mana viper tiles by roctavian. Both of the above monsters end up using the highly-antiquated quotes system (inspired by Nethack???) to specifically describe their myths as more than just random fantasy syllable-mashing by quoting @a-book-of-creatures's site- I couldn't easily get my hands on the books they cited, but hopefully they're fine being quoted and cited in an open source project?)