Monster of the Week: Screaming Hunters

Monster of the Week, March 17, 2020

I'd say that this offering is somehow connected to Saint Patrick, but it really isn't.

Screaming Hunters

Nocturnal pack hunters, Screaming Hunters dwell on the edges of human lands, inhabiting ruins, abandoned cities, old sewers, and deep forests long abandoned by humans. They are ruthless predators but seem particularly attracted to hunting humans, often with relish and cruelty that is shocking and particular.

What is know about them is that they are naked, hairy humanoids with long talon-like hands and feet, toothy maws, tiny eyes, and long, questing tongues. Their long, hunched, and loping gait allows them to run faster than humans, and their endurance reflects their tirelessness in hunting prey. They rend prey with tooth and claw, allowing prey to bleed and suffer after a strike until other members of the pack can strike and wear down their prey.

Sages who have studied the few documented cases of their attacks on humanity speculate that the screaming hunters are somehow tied to humankind because of their vaguely human forms and because of their tendency to haunt places that were once inhabited, frequented, or tied to humans, as well as their particular hatred of humankind.

The Hunters are most known by the shrieking cries they emit, which seem to be such that they allow them to see in darkness through echolocation while simultaneously disorienting their foes.

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: Masked Haunter

Monster of the Week, April 14, 2020 I guess I am continuing to put these things out on the Internet. Masked Haunter Those who read through the play The King in Yellow are known to go mad, particularly if they read beyond the first act. But madness is not the only fate of those who meddle in the forbidden text. Sometimes, the text causes the world to warp. Other times, the text serves to open a door to other worlds, particularly when the play is performed. It is said that the Masked Haunter is native to the shores of Lake Hali, and that it is not unknown to the inhabitants of Carcosa. Called by the play, the Masked Haunter is transported from the Hyades to our world, where the alien beings are able to manifest and feed upon the minds of their prey. Hidden normally behind porcelain masks that conceal their brain-like bodies and loose flesh and tentacles that move them as they hover near the ground. They negotiate the world primarily through psyching senses; they feed o...

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