#tim morris

Picture by Timothy Morris

The cnidarian trees of the earth of the Quotidians, from Fellow Tetrapod.

Dungeons and Dragons Monsters - 96 © Tim Morris, accessed at his deviantArt page here.

[Commissioned by @glarnboudin, based again on Tim Morris’s D&D designs. The behavior for the pebbleshot is based on that of solitary wasps and burying beetles, just scaled up.]

Pebbleshot CR 4 N Magical Beast This creature looks something like an insect, with two buzzing wings and a gunmetal gray exoskeleton. Its front two limbs are short and end in broad claws, and its other four legs are longer and more delicate. Orange eyes peer from beneath its proboscis, which is oversized and tubular.

A pebbleshot is an insectoid predator that hunts to provision its young. As an adult, it eats little but nectar and fruit juices, but requires plenty of protein in the form of meat in order to fully develop. Pebbleshots dig burrows using their claws, stock them with multiple corpses (four Medium sized creatures or one Large sized creature is a typical larder), lay a single egg in the pile and then bury it. The grubs devour their stockpile and metamorphose into a hard, nut-shaped pupa, from which the adult later emerges.

A mated pair of pebbleshots often work together to hunt—a female can lay multiple eggs per season, and the male sticks with her in order to guard her and ensure he fertilizes all of them. They make hit-and-run attacks, swooping from the air to get within range and firing hardened masses of chitin from their proboscis. These are the pebbles for which the creatures are named. Pebbleshots can attack with their front claws as well, but these are better suited for digging into soil than flesh, and are used as a last resort.

Pebbleshots live fast and die young, completing their life cycle in a mere year. The adult form is often active for only a month or two before dying, their eggs laid and provisioned.

A portrait of Cadborosaurus by Timothy Donald Morris.  He looks wise.

“Dungeons and Dragons Monsters - 62″ © Tim Morris, accessed at his deviantArt gallery here

[The last of the Tim Morris D&D monsters commissioned by @glarnboudin​. I wanted to do this one because it reminds me of some toys I had as a kid. They were little rubber aliens or monsters with long snouts. All three of the ones I had had legs (some with toes, some insect-like), but I’ve seen tentacled ones more like this in passing. But I never knew who made them or where to get them (I got mine as prizes at Chuck E Cheeze, but never saw them after like one summer). I just looked up “rubber monster with snout” and apparently they were called Slurfies? I might need to buy some to reward my inner child for solving this more than 20 year old mystery.]

Tentaspouter CR 3 N Aberration This creature is vaguely like an octopus, with eight tentacles, but two of them are larger than the others and tipped with claws. It has eight eyes overlooking a long siphon, which is mobile and flexible.

Tentaspouters are cephalopod-like ambush predators that live by the water’s edge. They are most common in fresh water systems, although some do move into estuaries or salt marshes. Their hunting strategy consists of using powerful blasts of water to bludgeon and push prey around, preferably into the waiting arms of one of their kin. Only two of their tentacles are large and strong enough to strike from a distance, but once prey is grappled, all of the limbs come into play, as does the tentaspouter’s beak. The beak is much more like a stylet than the parrot-like beak of an octopus, and can drain blood at an impressive rate.

Tentaspouters are social creatures, and typically live and hunt in groups. These “gauntlets” are so called because they usually set up outposts running along a natural or constructed bridge, hoping to catch passing organisms on land. Tentaspouters can speak, albeit only to a limited degree, and supplement their speech with tentacle gestures and shifts in color. They are not inherently evil, but only a few of them realize that humanoids are different from animal prey. They do not value treasure, but valuable items may be found near their lairs, still held or carried by desiccated victims.

“D+D Monsters - Mernoceros” © Tim Morris, accessed at his deviantArt gallery here

[Commissioned by @glarnboudin​, based on Tim Morris’ excellent gallery of chimeras and other weirdoes for use in D&D. The mernoceros seemed like a logical extension of the sea cat, and so I tied their flavor text together. Have a whole aquatic Serengeti in your campaigns!

Edit. I forgot to copy and paste the introductory text in. Thanks to @abominationimperatrix​ for the head’s up!]

Mernoceros CR 6 N Magical Beast This creature looks like a rhinoceros from the waist forward and a small whale from the waist back. It has beady eyes, a large horn on the end of its nose, two stumpy forelimbs and a broad finned tail.

The mernoceros is an aquatic chimerical herbivore. They are common in shallow coastal water, particularly in places where there are too many predators for the inoffensive manatees to be prevalent. Mernoceroses are similar to their terrestrial cousins in being belligerent and likely to charge at the first sign of trouble, especially in the water. They are slow on land, and only emerge in order to give birth, nurse calves or crawl to a particularly lush tide pool during low tide.

Perhaps the greatest foe of the mernoceros is the sea cat, and the two species will fight to the death if their paths cross. A single sea cat stands little chance against a mernoceros, but a pride of the carnivores can and do kill lone mernoceroses if they can isolate them. These clashes are especially dangerous for fisherman and sailors in areas where the two species overlap, as neither is careful about collateral damage, and may do things like hide behind small boats (or try to breach into larger ones). Mernoceros horn has a mother-of-pearl sheen to it, and is prized by some coastal communities, leading to over-harvesting and population declines.

“Dungeons and Dragons Monsters - 17″ © Tim Morris, accessed at his deviantArt gallery here

[Commissioned by @glarnboudin. The artist involved designed about eighty creatures, mainly hybrids and fakeosaurs, as potential D&D threats. Check them all out here]

Dragonweed CR 5 N Large Plant This fibrous plant has a ovoid, woody body from which grow six roots, which clamber along the ground like tentacles. Above a crown of leaves is a long stalk, ending in a massive beaked head.

Dragonweeds are a pernicious and dangerous type of carnivorous plants. They are so named for their fear and elemental powers, but some dragons do encourage dragonweeds to grow outside their lairs as a security measure. Dragonweeds can conceal themselves among ordinary plant growth by retracting their stalk-like necks, and they are surprisingly stealthy for their size. A dragonweed radiates fear that overwhelms many creatures and keeps them from fleeing or fighting—this compensates for their slow speed and allows dragonweeds to close the distance to catch and eat all manner of prey.

Dragonweeds of all elemental affinities can crossbreed effortlessly, and new mutations can crop up even in pure bred strains. The only physical difference between dragonweeds of different affinities is the color lining their beak-like mouth. Acid-affiliated dragonweeds have a green mouth lining, blue indicates cold, yellow indicates electricity and a red color marks fiery dragonweeds. Stranger affinities are rumored but unsubstantiated, such as force, sonic or negative energy damage. They are of animal-like intelligence, but are fairly dim and uncurious at that. They ignore plant creatures of all kinds, and some more intelligent plant monsters keep them as pets and companions.