#Random creature design

[moroarts]

Random creature design

[arsonist-creationist]

[chimeride]

Le poisson Steve, the 259th Known One.

[w1f1n1ghtm4r3]

many a miscellaneous critter doodle

[sylph8-fr]

WOE

headcanoned dusthides be upon ye

[worms-for-brains]

Quick creature sketches

[chameleocoonj]

random spaceship sprite generator where would I be without you <3

[ryltha]

Forest Creature / Sketch

Homework: character generated by association game, hope you like this cutie! 😉

[skelizard]

Lil goblin fella things from sometime last year.

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

Hey new character poll, going on a Monster Prom kick!

I love this crazy ghost girl Polly, what are y'alls thoughts on her design and character? Give it some reblogs with your thoughts and opinions!

[lakesbian]

it's the moment like 4 of you have been waiting for:

i finally rotated pact creature design in my brain enough to post about it. to all the people who sent me asks wanting to hear my thoughts explaining Why Pact Creatures Are So Good this ones for you.

the core of pact's monster design boils down to one very good fact about pact's worldbuilding: in the world of pact, the universe canonically loves a good story. magic literally runs on themes and ideas. subsequently, strong themes aren't the end result of pact's monster design so much as they are the most fundamental aspect of it--meaningful themes and narratives are such a textually important part of how pact monsters work that one bogeyman outright tries to start a conversation with blake by, upon noticing the birdhouse in his soul (tm), asking if birds are important to him.

what really seals the deal on this being fascinating is that pact monsters aren't invented wholesale--a lot of the book hinges on offering its own explanations for preexisting folklore or urban legend. pact takes a variety of common threads in the way cultural myths & monsters are presented, picks out the conceptions with compelling implications, and distills them into one design so thematically coherent and clarifying that it makes you go "ohhh, why aren't All ghosts/dragons/fae like this? this is Exactly What They're Supposed To Be."

like, we all know that ghosts are dead people, and oftentimes the appearance and/or behavior they're written as having is either implicitly or explicitly based on reenactments of their past life/how they died, and sometimes they're depicted as lucid but more often than not they're depicted more like broken or warped remnants of a person, and sometimes they make things colder/give off Bad Emotional Vibes/etc. those are generally true assertions about how ghosts are often culturally presented.

pact takes that and explicitly declares that ghosts are what happens when something so bad happens that an imprint of the resultant misery is left on the fabric of the universe. some ghosts appear horrifying because their appearance is warped and exaggerated beyond what's realistically possible to match how awful whatever happened to them felt. some ghosts are more lucid because their imprint is more recent, or has been strengthened and fed by human attention instead of left to decay. some ghosts are less lucid because they were forgotten. when ghosts make the atmosphere feel awful to be in, that's because the ghost isn't just the imprint of the person, it's an imprint of the awful thing itself. incredibly interesting! it feels so very much like the absolute heart of what ghost stories are about--about the grief and horror of being impacted by the ever-present echo of something terrible, about something so viscerally wretched happening that reality itself cannot forget it, about the emotionally powerful interactions between someone still-living and the memory of someone already long gone.

(pact also gives an aside that, in very rare scenarios, neutral or arguably even positive occasions which leave a sufficiently strong enough impression can also become ghosts. genuinely fascinating expansion.)

& the thing here is that pact does this for creatures like ghosts that are already richly thematic and iconic, but it Also does it for creatures with less obvious theming. how do dragons work? what's pact's underlying explanation for their position as immortal, powerful, regal, fire-breathing* fantasy monsters?

*&, depending on the media, sometimes ice-breathing or poisonous or whatever else

well, you see, dragons are recursive loops. "dragons are recursive loops" is perhaps one of the Top All Time sentences in the entire book, and the delightful thing is that, in addition to sounding excellent, it makes sense.

that's how they generate and spit out so much of whatever their element is. they're snarls. they're ouroboroses. they're something feeding into itself, self-sustaining for thousands of years, drowning anything which threatens it in torrents of whatever the self-feeding element is--fire, sometimes, but it could be poison, or ice, or whatever else, and that's why you've probably heard of ice dragons in addition to classic fire dragons. Dragons Are Recursive Loops. recursiveness is, after all, a form of immortality.

or, like, fae? we all know that faeries are incomprehensibly old/outright immortal Tricky Little Bitches who like to manipulate people while posing in an inhumanly/horrifically beautiful fashion and going "teehee." pact takes that to a fantastically surreal level of extreme artifice, one that's almost grotesque in its dreamlike nature--they have all lived for so very long that, to them, boredom is worse than death, and so they have complicated social games spanning centuries, and speak in the most practiced of misleading wordplay, and perfectly curate their forests so that even the smallest pebble is an intentionally-chosen setpiece for their play. they graduated from handjobs a couple dozens of millennia ago--now they're more into erotic-poetic descriptions of full-body degloving. you will not notice when a faerie steals and replaces your child, because you are very young and stupid compared to them, and playing-pretend at being your child is only the briefest of trifles in their unfathomably long lifespan.

the other good bit is that pact explicitly acknowledges that faeries run on what is colloquially deemed Bullshit--the universe likes a good story, and faeries have gotten very good at telling it a moving story. if a faerie tells a good enough story about having a sword that breaks the laws of physics, then that is what their sword will do. and so the way to combat faeries is not to out-bullshit them--because no one is out-bullshitting a being with thousands of years of bullshitting practice--but to say "no, that's fucking stupid and made up" until their implausibly long sword acts like a sword of that size actually should and shatters on the spot.

& all of these writing decisions feel so naturally truthful to what these creatures are Supposed to be--they're really not wholly new takes, they're a presentation of preexisting ideas in a way that gets why those ideas appeal to people and goes full-throttle on all the most thematically rich or otherwise narratively interesting parts. It's Good Writing. I Like It. you could spend an entire essay breaking down the presentation of literally any single one of pact's creatures, it's that compelling in its reflection and organization of Ideas About Creatures.

[soothedcerberus]

Funny little creature shapes

[ammonitetheseaserpent]

Monster Hunter 🤝 Flight Rising 🤝 Creatures of Sonaria 🤝 Dragon Adventures

I don’t go here but the creature design is IMMACULATE

[clobertina]

Throws a random creature design I made super quickly because I’m stressed for no apparent reason lol

[greatestmeepboie]

Ors-ik enjoyers unite

Making my own weird predator horse species guys because the Kentucky Derby did something to me and now I'm making horse racing yautja's. Here's the ors-iks that are used in professional races and by clan royalty. They come in a variety of colors and patterns, this is just the base I guess. Ors-ik racing is a beloved tradition across yautja prime, and many clans come to visit the races (bad bloods aren't allowed tho)

Here's the siblings Ouv-isk (left) and Vo'u-kesh (right). Their parents own the company of professional ors-ik racing and they're forcing their kids to continue the tradition. Ouv is willing to continue the races and loves to do it, while Vo'u doesn't like it and wants to do the traditional hunting things that his friends do. Vo'u also hates chicken jockey jokes

Doodle of the professional racing outfit featuring a random accidentally spongebob themed yautja

If any of y'all got ideas for this stuff I'd be interested to hear about it :D

[kokelek]

I turned my old (from early 2019) and random characters into weird creatures, because I felt like it.