Monster of the Week:Flame Shadow

Monster of the Week, January 21

Each Tuesday, I share a system-agnostic monster painting with background. This week's monster is the Flame Shadow

Flame Shadow

Insubstantial, vaguely man-shaped creatures of fire, flame shadows seek unison with a human as if such union would make them complete. They are desperate for the union of flesh and flame, seeking the company of humans.

Sages speculate that these creatures come from the magical realm, the elemental planes, or the fires of hell. However, the fact is that the flame shadows do not speak and do not leave any clue to their presence.

Where they appear, fires break out. The humans they seek to unit with are charred and discarded as the flame shadows seek to unite with others.

Flame shadows seem focused on acting out ordinary activities as they interact with others, with tools, with buildings, and ultimately in trying to embrace humans, but all their actions are wordless pantomimes of human life.

As creatures of fire, the cannot be fought with ordinary weapons but must be fought with magic, water, or ice.

Comments

Monster of the Week: Gluttony Beast

Monster of the Week, May 12, 2020 They just keep coming. Gluttony Beast When someone lives a life using others' suffering to become wealthy, becoming gat off the work of others' labor and suffering, the cries of the oppressed are sometimes heard by the gods or the spirits of the magic realm and the oppressor is punished rather than being allowed to die. Such cursed individuals lose all of their faces but their mouths; their bodies become gelatinous masses of adipose tissue their libs become a mass of soft, slithering tentacles, and their intelligence becomes subsumed by hunger to eat riches and wealth and overcome by a desire to live in their own filth. However, the gluttony beast quickly becomes a curse to the communities in which they are reborn as well. They are ravenous, foul, and spread a miasmic and dolorous stink over the land, which poisons and sickens the land. They themselves are surprisingly quick. Though blind, their sense of smell helps them find pr...

Monster of the Week: The Grey People

Monster of the Week, May 5, 2020 In honor of the Mexican victory over the French in the town of Puebla in 1862, I'm going to post a monster like I would any other Tuesday The Grey People The Grey People appear in large urban crowds as inconspicuous, bland people who blend into the masses, usually hooded and cloaked with emotionless faces and almost colorless features. Their blandness is almost supernatural, and the specifics of their faces are almost headache-inducing if anyone looks at them directly. As a result, they disappear into a crowd, and people forget seeing them. The Grey People fear being discovered. If anyone begins to investigate them, the Grey People first try to disappear. After that, they begin to work on eliminating the threat, escalating from threats to attempts to kill the threat directly. In the process, those investigating the Grey People find that people do not remember these beings, and deny their influence.

Monster of the Week: Hangman Tree

Monster of the Week, April 28 I'm as surprised as you are that I keep publishing these things. Hangman Tree When a person is hanged unjustly, the psychic wound of that injustice marks the world. If the person being hanged unjustly is both magically gifted and willing to call on the dark powers to avenge their suffering, those dark powers are more than willing to grant the wishes of the supplicant and gain more presence on the material plane. These dark powers take the blood and the remains of the sacrifice, their rage and hatred, and the rage and hatred of the mobs that killed them and combine them with the earth itself and their own dark nature. From the ground where the body of the unjustly killed is buried or left to rot, the earth gives birth to a twisted, leafless tree. Eventually, the tree sprouts long filaments with eyes on the end of them, a great maw cracks in the trunk, and a misty gas issues from the tree. The misty gas first summons animals, whose blood feed...

Doug's Art and Games Blog

Search This Blog