Monsters of Antarctica

 In my contribution to the Antarctica Jam, I ended up being greatly inspired by the beastiery being created by the earlier contributers. Especially Mr.Mann's New Age/Remnants of the Old World feeling.

Pretty much all of these are in the beastiery, but goblinoids lack stats, perhalp because I had submitted as a group and so didn't seem to get split up like the individual entries were.

A lot of these were heavily inspired by Wolves Upon The Coast by Luke Gearing. I've not that great at making original ideas, so I mostly just rephrased the monsters from B/X, usually with some sort of conceptual but not mechanical twist.

Gargoyles

Perfection cannot be forever, the world is not perfect enough. To the proto-men of the dim sun, such claims were an abomination. The world could be sculpted by tools, but perfection required internal mastery as well. And so, they shape themselves through the first martial disciplines and elitist thoughts until they left their mortality behind. They are somewhere between flesh and stone now, great pterosaur wings allowing them to spread their perfect race. And yet the imperfect dim sun saps their spirits, reminds them of the flaws they see in each other. So, they hide away, letting their folded wings harden into menhirs.

Their lesser disciples, the vampires, could only preserve themselves and not transform their bodies or soul.

They cannot stand yams, gathered by the women who work the imperfect earth and make more imperfect humans.

I rolled gargoyles for a wilderness encounter and thought how can I do something interesting with this. I started with simpler inverting the notion that gargoyles are ugly, so these must be like beautiful statues. What if the Pukel Men from LotR and other folklore of standing stones being people came to life.

This naturally led to Pillar men from Jojo's Biazzare Adventures and Disney's Gargoyles. Wings adjusted for lost-world feel. The very macho nature of the Pillar Men led me to add the yam dislike, which also reflects the Jojo vampire link with garlic being a traditional ward against them.

Goblins, Hobgoblins and Bugbears

In this new creation, it is readily apparent there is an unfair order to the world. Humanity, regardless of its form, will seek out and use its power and tools to dominate the rest of the animal kingdom. The spirits which are not human wish to see that their progenies have just as much chance. A goblin is an animal repurposed into an equal shape, capable of speech, reason and filled with a sense of injustice for the presumptions of humanity. How dare they call them monsters when they denied the rest a fair chance.

Smaller animals are called Goblins for they have become so numerous. Medium sized or the lower end of mega-fauna are called Hobgoblins, for being smaller than the original Animal-Men. But the first and greatest of the Goblins are the Bugbears, those warriors of crocodile, bear and mammoth.

They are made by taking an animal of the appropriate size and holding it longways, one for each leg. Then they jump over it, causing the body to lengthen and shift, chanting the spirit totem so the animal may learn what it missed.

Animal-Men shun tools which cannot be used to gain an edge upon humanity and likewise shun all treasure but that which may decorate a nest or intrigue a wild creature.

The greatest insult is magic in all its forms, they cannot use it yet and so it is rightfully despised.

Didn't want to just make them D&D monsters but still wanted them to be some sort of living creature. So I couldn't make them too weird. Since goblinoids in D&D are usually rendered as some sort of animal-person, I thought going the full way would be good. Also draw a little bit of inspiration from the Broo/Beastmen of Runequest/Warhammer in how they turn other animals into new goblinoids. The dislike of human civilisation keeps them in the enemy category without tying myself in knots about ethics.

Medusa

Rather than be reduced to ash, some of those from Before became fragments, like a shattered glass depiction of the glamour that they had woven into themselves. To look upon them is the know for less than an instant the moment everything ended. As body and soul fragment into a series of still forms, movement broken down by the frame.

Trying to keep on the vibe which Luke Gearing gave his medusa, tragic and cursed women in the vein of Ovid's fanfiction. Luke's version were the handmaidens of the Roman Empire, now abandoned and lonesome in the ruins of Dark Age northern Not-Europe

 I drew a lot on Mr.Mann's Before Kingdom, which to me was somewhere between Atlantis and the Elves, but probably more on the Atlantis side, all weird magitech and strange ruins. In that I ended up drawing on the semi-scientific language Patrick Stuart used in Veins of the Earth. The idea a monster could be swapping between a naturalistic D&D description and then serge into mentioning it's power worked by quantum mechanics or radiation.

Zygomaturus

Stats as Draft Horses, Number Appearing 3D10

I wanted some Dire Wombats, but realised that Diprotodon were not right for my area. So I picked a smaller extinct Diprotodontidae that better fit the ecology.