#kalidah

Very much tied to the Baumian Oz, I would love to someday work this into a complete story, so many different cool ideas

If anybody is at all curious about my sketches. Over the last couple of years I've taken to thumbnailing quite a bit on the computer. I just have these really big canvases where zoomed in I just doodledy-doodle, doing lots of different iterations of what I'm after. Once I have something I like I just copy paste it into a new canvas, scale up and re-sketch.

To create space I eventually start clustering stuff together, organizing them by general subject. Moving and moving again to create the most amount of empty space, until I end up with a canvas that's chock-full of all these tiny sketches. Once I can't create any more empty space, I move onto a new canvas.

Inktober Kalidah! © Sam A. Milazzo, accessed at his deviantArt gallery here

[More Oz stuff. These monstrous beasts appeared in the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but were cut from the movie. In their original appearance, they were not apparently sapient. In later Oz books, they could talk, since everything in Oz could talk by that point. I split the difference by making them sapient, but not very bright.]

Kalidah CR 11 CE Magical Beast This beast is the size of an elephant, combining the most ferocious aspects of a tiger and a bear. Its coat is black and striped with white, and its head is orange.

Kalidahs are powerful and deadly hybrids of bears and tigers, larger and crueler by far than both. They are strict carnivores, and their favorite diet is to prey on carnivorous animals. Kalidahs are bullies and sadists by nature, and enjoy stalking prey over long distances, making brief and bloody attacks but retreating before they make the kill, the better to draw out their quarry’s suffering. A kalidah would rather die than retreat, which means that while they are ferocious combatants, they can be lured into traps by the clever and wary. Because of their outright contempt for other predatory beasts, some druids believe that kalidahs were created as an affront to the natural world. They speak both Common and the language of animals, but rarely say much except for taunts and threats.

Lurking in the dark forests of Oz are the Kalidahs, wild beasts with the heads of tigers and the bodies of bears. Like many creatures in Oz, they're both sentient and capable of speech, but their large size and general malevolence means they won't pay any heed to the begging of their prey. Their size, ferocity and lack of pity makes them among the most terrible creatures in Oz.

The Kalidahs the first real threat that Dorothy encounters in Oz. The Cowardly Lion was ready to fight to the death to protect her, though he knew that he was no match for them. Thankfully the Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman came up with a plan that prevented this hopeless sacrifice.

The kalidahs (half-tiger, half-bear monsters) are the first legit threat that Dorothy and her crew actually encounter. Most of the so-called antagonists in the Oz books are as harmless and dopey as the other inhabitants, but the kalidahs are one of the few that will straight up eat you.

Of course the threat kinda gets lessened in the following books when Baum decided that nah nobody actually dies in Oz or whatever, so it kinda makes you wonder what happens to any creatures that get eaten. Do they “live” on as sentient piles of mush? Do they become ghosts? Are they swallowed whole and just camp out in the monsters’ stomachs until they figure a way out.