#mountain devil

spiky lizard

Image © Zach Taylor, accessed at the artist’s website here

[The Lone Pine Mountain Devil exists only because of YouTube. It originated in the short video “Mountain Devil Prank Fails Horribly”, a found footage piece less than four minutes long with some pretty-darn-good-for-amateur CGI. In the tradition of the Blair Witch, the producers of the video created a backstory for their monsters with a Jesuit priest surviving an encounter in Gold Rush days and posted it online, where it drifted to Wikipedia (evidence is scarce about this origin; I’m not sure if they posted it to Wikipedia themselves, or if someone else did). Once the cryptid community got hold of it, the Lone Pine Mountain Devil became difficult to eradicate, and additional lore built up around it. Most of the claims are that it’s a four winged dinosaur, a la Microraptor, and that it only attacks people who disturb the forest. But whether it’s furry or feathered, has membranes or feathers on its wings, or even what size it is are all based on whoever happens to be telling the story at the time. A real Rorschach “cryptid”.

This art came from A Field Guide to the Cryptids of North America, which is a bad book but has nice art. I like the imagining of the CGI monster from the short (which looks like a winged version of the Honeycomb Craver) as something closer to a real animal, and went with that approach for my statistics.]

Mountain Devil CR 4 N Magical Beast This creature looks like a large bat, about the size of a human child, with four wings and short hind legs. Its head is long and lizard-like, with an array of slavering teeth.

Mountain devils are carnivorous bats native to pine forests in high altitudes. They have no fiendish affinities—their name is instead a reference to their ferocity and the danger they pose to travelers. Mountain devils live and hunt communally, using pack tactics to overwhelm prey as large as a stone giant. Their saliva contains acidic venom, capable of turning the blood of its victims into corrosive acid. Corpses left behind when the mountain devils are done feeding are typically mutilated beyond recognition.

The roosts of mountain devils are found in caves, cliffs and old, durable trees. Mountain devils are communal breeders—there is no fighting over mates, and kits born to the same litter often have different fathers. If large prey is unavailable, mountain devils will hunt separately and return to their roosts to regurgitate food for those unlucky enough to have failed in the hunt. Although they could theoretically be domesticated by a trainer with patience and acid resistance, they do poorly when kept away from other members of their own species.

Cambewarra, Sunday 19th December 2021