Bogleech.com article previews are the very least I can do for you guys, so here's five Pokemon reviews I've not yet published, uploaded to a patrons-only directory. Ads and comments are disabled on these, but you can leave feedback here or wait for their official uploads:
NEW: $5 patrons and up will get some short, weird fiction writing every single month! These will be collected and "published" at the end of the year! Many are "list format" horror because that seems to be what I'm best at. Hope you don't mind weird lists of things with a loose narrative!
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On the early morning of April 12th, 2004, professional cave diver Wallace Howard Hodgton of Wakulla County, Florida was separated from his group during an exploration of the local Indian Springs cave. Presumed dead, he would be found again on January 23rd, 2021, floating unconscious but alive in Devil's Eye cave many miles from the unconnected Indian Springs. He would regain consciousness six days later, with vivid memories of a strange and physically improbable environment.
According to Wallace, he believed he had taken a familiar path on a routine dive he had conducted "dozens of times," but suddenly found himself in an unrecognized and undocumented tunnel. Attempts to retrace his path and search for recognizable landmarks were unsuccessful, and he eventually breached the surface beneath the open sky, surrounded by a vast expanse of water.
Though he had entered the cave at high noon, the sun was now low in the sky and behind a covering of grey clouds, leading him to believe it was setting. At no point during this experience did the sun set any farther or otherwise move in his recollection.
He could not see sign of land in any direction, which should only have been possible many miles out to sea, but the water was fresh, drinkable, and roughly body temperature. This water was "flawlessly crystal clear," but beneath him faded to pitch darkness. Its surface was also still and flat, and he notes that even his own motions did not make waves or ripples.
Wallace believed that he may still have been swept out to sea and suffering from audio-visual hallucination, and began swimming North, towards what should have been the Florida coastline. He is unable to recall how much time may have passed, but that he never grew tired or hungry.
Wallace was able to recall encountering the following "animals" and other phenomena, in order:
-A uniformly bright white butterfly, including its body and eyes, drowned on the water's surface. He would go on to pass by "dozens" of these and occasionally "clumps" of them, but would never observe a living specimen.
-A transparent, broadly flattened animal matching descriptions of a Leptocephalus, a larval eel, roughly the length of his arm. These would remain common, ranging from a few inches to many meters in length, but would ignore his presence.
-A man-made signpost, worn and wooden, with nothing written on it. The pole descended all the way down into the depths, and he estimated that he could clearly see several hundred feet of it before it faded into the darkness far below. As he passed, he felt certain it was turning to continue facing him.
-Something similar to a tremendous stalk of white kelp floating horizontally in the water, each end disappearing into the opposite horizon. It was not possible to judge its relative size or distance through the utterly transparent water. Though there was no current, the "leaves" undulated slowly.
-Something resembling a white eye in the darkness below him for several seconds. He could not determine its depth, size, or surrounding body shape before it disappeared. He notes that he has never been fearful of danger and was too fascinated to be alarmed by most of his encounters, but this one made him feel suddenly nauseated.
-Several large, red spheres covered in sharp spines, floating at the water's surface similarly to naval mines and roughly volleyball-size. He was careful to swim around these, but was startled at one point when he evidently disturbed one and it emitted a sound similar to a "train whistle" before plunging straight down. As it descended, he could see what resembled humanlike black "lips" on top of the sphere, and that they then curled into a bright white "smile."
-Something foul smelling that resembled a swollen, grey and white frog as large as a man, floating on its back, with no obvious mouth, eyes or head. He believed it was dead until its stomach began swelling and contracting rapidly, producing a croaking sound. He heard a chorus of similar calls echo from all directions for several minutes, but could never see another of the drifting bodies.
-A car of unknown make and model hovering a few meters under the water. Its four doors were open and its headlights were on. There were no license plates or other markings and no other signs of human life.
-Another of the white "kelp stalks," rising straight up from the depths before its opposite end continued out of the water and up into the sky, vanishing into the clouds. Wallace could now observe that this stalk was "big around as a truck tire" with "leaves" at least two meters in length. Far below the water, he observed a loop of the stalk tightly wrapped around a huge, mottled pinkish shape "like a raw thanksgiving turkey," unmoving. He noted that the "leaves" of the seaweed-like organism were sunken deep into the flesh of this strange corpse.
-A dark shape in the foggy distance that he nearly mistook for a person, but this shape was moving "like the lizards that run on water" and did not respond to his calls. Instead, he heard his calls echo back to him from high overhead. Though the running figure displayed no reaction to Wallace's own voice, it abruptly fled at an accelerated pace as his voice was echoed, and this echo would continue repeating his words as it "followed" the running figure, fading into the distance.
-His first encounter with the "turkeys" in a living state, encountering a group of the creatures that reached up to the size of a blue whale, in his estimation. These had long, turtle-like flippers for appendages and an open, dark hole at each end of the body, with mottled pink and brown flesh. Thin-legged white "spiders" were clinging to some of these animals, with leg spans he estimated up to three meters.
-The first animal he found "instantly terrifying," which he described as a hairless, earless, grey-white "dog" with clawed forelimbs "held out like eagle wings" and stunted hind legs, similar to those of a bat or a pterosaur. It had "grinning" jaws and pure white eyes, its body "stiff as a corpse" with no obvious means of propulsion as it cut rapidly through the water, circling him several times before disappearing into the depths. He estimated its arm span to be at least ten meters. He would see a few more of these creatures in the depths, never approaching him again.
-A long mass of black hairlike material rising from the depths and floating on the surface. Through the water, he could see many more of these tufts, like a "swaying forest" just under the water's surface. Wallace felt incredibly uneasy, giving these hairs a wide berth.
-One of the "kelp" floating near the surface, still with no visible end. This was impossible to pass without swimming beneath it, a prospect the experienced cave diver found uncharacteristically frightening. When he did submerge for the first time, he was met with a "cacophony of sounds; squeals, trills, zaps, groans, creaking, thrumming, like a jungle full of exotic bird calls." These sounds were clear even through not only the water but through his wetsuit and earplugs, and he felt he could judge their direction and distance to a degree that wasn't natural. He surmised that the water conducted sound in a clearer way than any documented environment, feeling he could "hear the way we're really supposed to." From this point onward, he began swimming with at least one ear partially submerged, listening to the various calls. He noted that the "kelp" behind him sounded like "angry bees" and that a passing school of the transparent eels sounded like "thousands of little windchimes."
-An unpleasantly loud creaking sound, similar to a rusted metal hinge, was soon revealed to be the sound of the "dog things" as several of them shot past him. He would eventually swim by a "feeding frenzy," the creatures some distance away but large enough to be plainly visible through the clear water. They were feasting on a pale blue "log" of meat, and he noted that the clouds of blood sank straight down rather than billowing out into the water. Large numbers of the glassy eel-like animals were present, scavenging small tissue scraps, and he could see a number of rounded whitish shapes farther below, obscured by the blood sinking into the dark water. Though local fauna paid him no mind, he felt an intense fight or flight response at the sight of the "log."
-Noting a comical tuba-like sound, Wallace slightly changed course and traced this "flatulent orchestra" to a pod of the "whales." Having made no progress following the motionless sun, he opted to follow these animals for an unknown amount of time and would observe several behaviors, including a tendency for smaller individuals to swim circles around larger specimens and the same adult pairs, distinguishable by their markings, to swim with their front flippers in nearly constant contact. They did not appear to "flap" or "wave" their flippers in order to swim, but he noted that their anterior and posterior orifices visibly pumped in unison.
-At some point in following the "whale pod," the animals began emitting a more frantic, higher pitched sound and spread out from one another, what he calls a "slow motion panic" as a deep droning sound began to come from seemingly all directions. He soon observed dark shapes rising from below and recognized the clumps of black hair he had encountered earlier, filling an area as far as he could see in every direction. The whale-like animals became visibly entangled in the rapidly rising material and he felt certain he'd be "swallowed up" himself, but the mass soon began to retreat in the depths before surfacing, taking the entire "whale pod" with it. He reportedly felt a profound sense of loss, more than felt rational to him, as though he had lost close friends or family.
-What he believed at first to be a human skeleton hanging beneath the water, face-down and limbs dangling, but more "apelike or maybe catlike" on further inspection. Through the perfectly clear water and with no other frame of reference, it looked only inches away, but when he noted the limbs descending out of sight, he estimated it to be many times larger than any animal observed thus far. As he passed over it, light reflection suggested that it was encased in a membrane of tissue almost as clear as the surrounding water, and it became evident that the appendages were moving, albeit in extremely slow motion. He surmised that it may have been walking on an unseen solid surface, but that each "step" took what felt like a full ten minutes of what may have been an hour that the massive object remained in his visual field. He observed absolutely no other organisms during this time.
-A "horrible mass," like a globular tangle of viscera, that pulsed through the water like a jellyfish and emitted soft "gasps." He was "paralyzed with fear" when it opened a "humanlike eye" on one side, which turned toward him, but it continued on its way. Following this organism was a shoal of recognizable large fish species including catfish, sturgeon, salmon and a swordfish, among others, but all appeared "mostly eaten," many reduced to only heads. These "swam" after the huge "jellyfish" by an unknown means of propulsion.
-Another "feeding frenzy" of the doglike creatures, tearing apart another of the "meaty logs." He noted round, whitish shapes once again scavenging the underwater rain of blood, now closer to the surface, and felt repulsed by their "humanlike eyes and toothless mouths," which he believed to be the source of a piglike squealing. As the "dogs" fed, the object rotated, and he was more disturbed to realize its resemblance to a finger, with both a fingerprint and massive nail.
-After a lengthy period of no new observations, he was elated to see what appeared to be a man in a boat, though he grew more concerned when the figure did not at first respond to sound. As he approached, it appeared indeed to be an ordinary fisherman adrift in a small boat, a Caucasian man he estimated to be in his thirties or forties. The man stared straight forward and did not respond to sound or questioning. Wallace felt something was "just not right" and began to back away, when the occupant of the boat evidently opened its mouth, without turning to look at him, and emitted his own name in his own voice. Wallace proceeded to "swim away from there as fast as was humanly possible."
-His last reported encounter was with a "wall" of the undulating black hair, and attempted to go around it, finding its circumference seemingly endless. He had decided to swim in a different direction when he felt his foot tangle in a stray knot of the material and entered a "blind panic" at the sensation, involuntarily shrieking. At this, a recognizable white eye opened some depth below, and he recalls "just screaming and screaming" as he made out the rest of a pale blue, humanlike face slowly turning towards him. He vividly recalls the eyes widening as if with shock, and the mouth opening into "just a circular black hole" before he blacked out.
Upon his retrieval from Devil's Eye cave, Wallace is reported to have repeatedly uttered "see the secret sea!" while he remained unconscious. He has since maintained that what he experienced had to be a lucid dream or hallucination, but his actual whereabouts during his disappearance remain unknown, and his physical condition presented several anomalies. His bones and muscles exhibited atrophy consistent with spending many years in a weightless environment, but none of the detrimental effects of prolonged submersion in water or extensive sun exposure. Wallace does not recall eating, but showed no evidence of starvation. His hair and nails had grown very little and his teeth were healthy except for his lower left molars, which were missing with no sign of forcible removal or any history of dental extraction.
Wallace's lower intestine was found to be obstructed by a clot of black, human hair of unknown identity. The longest of these hairs were 103 meters in length when fully unraveled.
Wallace has refused further interview or study and has since retired to Nevada.
This will be going up on itch.io on October 31st, but you can get it early here, at least as PDF! It collects some stories I never made public before, but several have been shared here on Patreon over the years. At the end, detailed thoughts and even a few drawings about the stories included!
This is a story that came to me spontaneously...but only its first half. The second half isn't merely unfinished, but doesn't even have a concept yet! I've been considering inviting people to come up with their own continuation or monster as kind of a mini writing contest, but I'm not sure. Another thing I've considered is reworking it into basically just a rundown of multiple "cases," like the author's "top ten," but maybe I write too many things that are list format like that.
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What comes to mind when you hear the words "monster hunter?" Maybe it's the gaming series of the same name, or maybe you're picturing some Van Helsing looking character tracking down werewolves and vampires. The bosses like to think of it that way, and whoever he works for certainly thinks what we do is a big enough deal to keep most of the world in the dark somehow, "Men In Black" style.
But very few careers in the world are as glamorous as their public image, and we're no different. We don't fight zombies or demons or chupacabras or anything that exciting. We don't even know if what we fight can rightfully be called "monsters" at all, besides the fact that the things we deal with seem more or less alive, in some sense, and that they're not easily explained.
This probably still sounds romantic to you. Unexplainable creatures! I get it, but you want to know what my last job was like? The last "monster" we cleaned up? I really do mean "cleaned up," since we slew the beast with nothing but hydrogen peroxide and a mop, and while the office called it a "Class 4 Contaminating Plasmodiform," we all agreed the moment we saw it (and smelled it) that its name should be The Asscheese. Yeah, it did actually kill someone...but near as we could tell, that's only because it left enough stinking grease around their house that the poor bastard slipped headlong into a marble countertop, and what likely began as a Class 1 had spent about a week, by our estimate, slowly growing over the body, engulfing his left arm and almost everything from his chest on down in a white, chunky mush you'd never guess was alive if not for the subtle way it rippled, like a sheet of maggots in slow motion.
Maybe you're wondering why anyone would bother to cover up a case like that. Something that looks more or less like dog vomit, moves like a snail and has all the killing power of a dropped banana peel isn't the kind of discovery that upends society's understanding of the universe, no...but then we started scrubbing the thing off the body, and the flesh underneath wasn't simply eaten away. Wherever Asscheese had been feeding, or whatever the hell it does, the guy's skin was entirely covered in pale, pink bumps, maybe the size of my thumbnail, and every single one of those bumps had the same subtle, pointed ridge in the center, right between the same two shallow, round depressions, just above the same tiny, horizontal crevice. The Asscheese had turned that dead man's skin into a mosaic of miniature half-formed faces, and I can't possibly guess how, or why, or what would have happened if we hadn't interrupted the process.
We're basically kept as ignorant as we can possibly be without it hampering our work. We operate out of a cheap office space under a manager who's changed so many times, I've given up getting to know any of them by name, and we have no idea who really employs us beyond that. Whoever they are, they advertise us as simple ghost hunters, psychic investigators or even "unconventional pest specialists," and the majority of calls we get are obviously just about a really big cockroach or a suspiciously creaky staircase, so those get patched through to mundane bug guys or spirit mediums we have some sort of local arrangement with. When we hear something like "I didn't know who else to call" or "I don't even know what I'm dealing with," that's when we start listening. When someone has a problem weird enough to call what they think is a ghost hunter, and they still aren't sure they're in the right ballpark, that's usually the real deal.
A hypothetically organic or sentient entity that defies explanation by natural law. A "monster," because we just don't have a better term for that.
But god, there are days I'd kill for it to just be a really big cockroach. If you thought The Asscheese sounded bad, you should have been there to see why we called one of them the Pusbucket, or why "Mr. Squelch" put me off spaghetti and meatballs to this day. Not all of them are just disgusting, but they're always confusing or disturbing, and some of them are definitely more dangerous than a banana peel. Those little faces growing out of that dead guy might be an image that'll stick with me, but I still have nightmares about the Dancing Teeth incident, and I never needed an asthma inhaler until we faced The Blacklungs. One time we got called out for a "weird tree," which is about as good a description as any, and found out the hard way that it slowly dissolved anything caught in its shadow.
At this point, maybe some of you have the same question seemingly every trainee has by the time they've learned this much: they almost always ask me what's the weirdest thing I've ever seen on the job. Or maybe they ask about the most dangerous, or if any of them really and truly terrified me. The answer to all of the above is the same one, and if you're also wondering why I'm only now blabbing about all this to the internet, well, that ties in too.
Yeah, I'm gonna get into some deep shit for it, maybe even "disappear" or have a little "accident" any day now; I can't help but notice that I've never seen any of our callers ever again, even if I drive by what used to be their homes. But there's a case we're nowhere close to solving, and it's getting worse, and people deserve to know what to look out for. If they're gonna have me wacked or whatever it is they do, I don't really give a shit at this point.
It's a case we officially call a Class 9 Ambulatory Evacuator, and whatever that sounds like to you...I promise you it's worse than that.
When I first designed Vampiathan, I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do for a whale-based monster, or how to make a whale seem "vampiric." What makes a whale most interesting is that so much of it is a huge mouth, so in the end I just made the mouth a bit more "alien" by making it tripartate, and then I made the rest of the creature unsettlingly wrinkly. The idea of a huge vampire swallowing tiny victims whole is a disturbing one, and brought to my mind the Sarlacc from Star Wars, though I like the idea that Vampiathan's prey don't really suffer at all; like the victims of any classic vampire, they don't really feel much of anything and are kept under a spell. Since they're also kept alive long-term as vassals, I've come to imagine a Vampiathan as almost working like a vampiric submarine with a parasitized "crew."
I decided to keep this updated version fairly close to the original, though it accidentally came out looking a lot "happier," and I feel like I already miss how tiny and lower down the original one's eye was; something I totally overlooked when I only briefly referenced the old artwork.
Besides the larger flippers and the addition of barnacles, the biggest change in the new design is the baleen instead of teeth, something I actually wanted in the original but didn't really know how to draw to my liking with only paper and pencil. Baleen is one of the visually weirder characteristics of any whale, and makes more sense for a vampire that keeps prey alive anyway.
Finally, I also based the interior of the blowhole a on the look of a bat's nose :)
Download the PSD file if you want to play around with the raw artwork!
I've still been hard at work updating a lot of Mortasheen artwork, here's a closer look at the cockroach-based Arthropoid.
Karacha went through a few designs in the setting's early years, mostly more "serious" and "cool" looking before I decided to go cartoonier, giving them an Ed Roth "Rat Fink" style, envisioning them as mischievous gremlin-like troublemakers.
They also had actual wings, since I felt like they were crucial to the aesthetic of a cockroach, but most Arthropoids are wingless. With the newest design, I compensating by giving it a translucent, filmy, segmented tunic down its back.
I feel I may have made a lot of this design too dark and too convoluted, unfortunately. It's good enough, but I think it could have been clearer.
This is the smaller counterpart to Parasidious, but I wasn't satisfied just tracing over the original art. I'm not sure if I like its new mouth more than the old mouth, even if it's not a big change, but I'm happy with how the rest turned out, especially my decision for the snail shell to more smoothly transition into the creature's flesh. It basically uses the shell like a "peg leg," but it can do all sorts of dangerous moves with it.
I don't think of either Parasidious or Eyezome as having actual snail DNA in them, but they're still "molluscoids," in the same sense that you can have a "humanoid" that isn't even a mammal.
Oddly, I first came up with this design years back as something entirely unrelated to Mortasheen: I wondered what a snail character might have looked like in the 80's Ninja Turtles action figure line, and drew some inspiration from WYRM ( https://turtlepedia.fandom.com/wiki/Wyrm_(1991_action_figure) ) ....I no longer have those doodles, but they were a bit more Turtles style, with tattered clothes and goofier, non-parasitized eyestalks.
PSD attached!
Though it wasn't originally created as such, I think of this as kind of the most "general" Wormbrain class monster, the Wormbrain type specimen.
I've been satisfied with this design since I drew its greyscale version nearly a decade ago, so its full color artwork traces over much of the original drawing. It's supposed to evoke something that could have been a human, before brain parasites distorted it into a "snail."
I always imagined it with a pinkish-yellow skin tone, but didn't end up liking that when I tried it, went through a few other color schemes and finally just messed around with color values until the whole thing looked like the translucent flesh of a bruised cadaver.
One difference between the two designs is how the eyestalks connected to the head; the new one is more like a real gastropod, flesh smoothly transitioning into the tentacles, and a shading effect gives the impression of the parasitic brood sacs continuing down into the body :)
PSD file available to download! You can find some of the alternate color layers in there, too.
Work on so many things at once really slowed down custom Patron rewards, to the point that some people have waited up to a year for some requests to be finished, and that's really not acceptable on my part. As a compensation, I'd like to offer credit for my etsy store to anyone who's been a patron; everyone with outstanding requests can optionally have a pin (or something of equivalent value) sent to them from my etsy for each request I've missed.
Getting a pin will also be a permanent addition to the $30 tier if you're within the USA; shipping to some other countries can be murder right now, so outside the U.S. will have to be figured out case by case!
You can send me your shipping info and pin choices by private message at any time!
This came out a little messy, but it's the first design that popped into my head. A decrepit old wizardly opossum, blind and hairless, maybe kind of undead, with the spirits of baby opossums riding around in the hat. Also with orb.
Requested forever ago, this is what this portable EEG device would look like as Awful Hospital Staff, latching on to someone's head to collect initial data before a more permanent (but probably weird) solution would be found. The eyeballs would rotate inwards to "look" at the patient's brain activity.
https://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/mattoon.htm - Mattoon is technically one of the first Mortasheen monsters, and went through many more designs than I sadly even held onto over 20 some years. It's always been one of my favorites, and I originally thought of it as one of the "iconic" Bioconstructs, so I can no longer really remember what possessed me to recategorize it as a stinkbug Arthropoid for a couple of years. A real, proper stinkbug is in the pipeline, I promise!
Originally named Stinkweed, the monster later acquired the name Mattoon after a city in Illinois, because I first heard of this city in the context of an obscure urban legend, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. The legend was in turn introduced to me as a young child through a toy line, Monster in my Pocket, which interpreted the gasser as an almost insect-like mutant creature I've also included a photo of, and is also kind of the inspiration for every other gas-masked Mortasheen creature. Collectively I think of them as a "family" of "Mad Gassers" and their eventual updates will better reflect a relationship with one another.
For Mattoon's new look, I combined characteristics I liked from across its past revisions as well as the Monster in My Pocket gasser, and decided I wanted it to look a little more dangerous than its previous incarnation without losing any "cuteness;" a creature that looks like it can mess you up, but also looks like it doesn't really want to.
I chose a specific kind of gas mask as the face model; the kind with both "nose" and "mouth" filters that result in a very strange fly-like yet anteater-like look. For its eyes, I used the deep sea fish Winteria telescopa as a model, actually a species of barreleye that's become harder to research as another species became so much more famous for its weirder, transparent head - understandable!
For the blisters, I used bubble algae as a reference, and spent an absurd amount of time fiddling with them. The art file, as usual, is kind of a mess of redundant layers, and the blisters alone are spread across multiple as I went back and decided I wanted more of them in a wider variety.
Heartsucker is actually much, much older than Mortasheen - a doodle I made in 1998 (!) that was meant to be the combination of a flea and a kiwi bird, the Fleawi! By the time I added it to Mortasheen, my rule was that all arthropod creatures were hybridized with humans, but I kept the "kiwi shaped" design because it still had sort of humanoid qualities to me, its beak sort of like an exaggerated nose. My thinking was also that cartoon fleas are often given big, pointed snouts to bite with, too.
As one of my favorite monsters based on what I think is the absolute coolest looking insect, I put a record amount of time into perfecting this one...twice! I didn't like the first version I made, so I completely redid it from scratch, and I think this version improves it in every way. It feels more like a human-flea to me than it did before, and I was careful to make sure its "true face" looked cool to me even without the new, translucent "helmet" concept, which I basically lifted from Giger's Xenomorph.
The first helmet here is my new "default" design. The second is based on the bizarre "helmed" fleas in nature, which have an additional hat-like barbed panel on their head. The third helmet makes Heartsucker look like a more typical flea, and the final one brings it back to the "kiwi bird" design.
One of the biggest changes is also the number of limbs. Heartsucker always had just a single pair, but I decided I wanted it to have four limbs for an extra dash of the human-hybrid aspect. Since I still liked the two-limb design, I simply made its hind pair extremely tiny and vestigial.
A photoshop PSD is downloadable from this post, but beware my ridiculous number of layers; each of the four helmets even has its own folder of layers, and is also accompanied by a couple layers that provide each helmet with distinct shadows cast against the body.
I think of Clampire as one of the most fundamental Mortasheen vampires, but was never quite into the design I gave it. This new design is modeled after the swimming larval stage of certain bivalves, which really do have two big wing-like lips with a single pair of eyespots! I've combined this with the intense colors of some tropical scallops, made the shell spiny and nasty looking, and I've reimagined it as attacking with glochidia, the parasitic larvae present in some freshwater mussels.
I've also attached the photoshop PSD file if you want to take a look through it!
SUDDEN UPDATE: I wasn't quite satisfied with the eyespots, they were just too flat. Now it has more bulging eyes in its membranes, and the membranes themselves are softer colored with less internal inking. I also gave them blue tips for more color contrast!
If you supported the kickstarter, you've probably seen this, but I'd also like to share it with all $10 plus Patreon patrons! Currently just available here as an RTF text file:
I'm having SO much difficulty settling on the base color for this monster's body! A real flea looks pitch black until it's in direct light, and then it's usually a translucent amber. I can't seem to pick a middle ground that I like, especially for a human/flea hybrid that might not retain the exact colors of either creature anyway.
I designed this monster with its "helmet" removable, too; there are real fleas with strange helmet-like head growths of chitin, the functions of which aren't really known.
This is one of the oldest Mortasheen creatures, and the original concept behind the design was that a human combined with a flea might look like a cartoonist's impression of a flea; a hopping thing with a pointy nose.
For this remake, I wanted it to look a little more like a human hybrid. It's fleshier and it now has four limbs, but I gave it severely reduced hind legs so that the arms and hands are what it leaps on. The chitinous helmet allows it to keep the weird, pointy nosed look and a more flea-like appearance while also homaging Giger's xenomorph, which fleas have always heavily reminded me of.
I just don't know about the color scheme....a real flea can look amber, black, or mahogany depending on the lighting.
All seven of the original Devilbirds have now been updated, and I'll be putting them all up on here eventually!
The original design for Lust combined a baby, a heart, and a hummingbird, but not all that well in my opinion. My standards for creature design evolved so much and far beyond a point where "creepy human baby" was all that effective to me anymore.
The new Lust more fully integrates the heart motif, so that the whole entire creature is formed from a mutated branching aorta, with the heart itself as the head. I tried to still keep the appearance of a flying baby, so that it would also represent a "cherub" or "cupid," the pose even lifted from a specific renaissance era painting of an angelic baby I used for reference.
The white shine on the head was unplanned, accidentally happening through a combination of shading and luminosity layers, but it wound up looking just like the staining and bleaching of real preserved heart specimens I've seen in person, so I kept it.
You can download the PSD here too, if you feel like navigating my dozens and dozens of layers, some redundant in case I ever wanted to go back and re-edit something.
Harold first appeared as a dummy lying in the corner of Jay's Hospital room, and was mentioned in his journals as something he used to talk to, then something he was taking out his aggression on. This references the real-world horror folk tale of Harold the scarecrow, made more famous by Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
Harold, in the original story, slowly came to life because of the two farmers treating it like a living being, and pouring so much of their emotion into it as they began to mistreat it. Whether something similar happened between Jay and this being is something I don't plan on really deciding myself.
Harold is one of the "Old Flesh" pieces, like the inner circle Parliament, but commenters have already correctly guessed that Harold was rejected by them, possibly for being too unstable to keep under control.
Beneath the sack, Harold is a basket-like webbing of fleshy tubes.
Just for patreon patrons (and all tiers!) here's a whole dozen "retro gameboy" Mortasheen sprites of my own. By the time the RPG releases, there will be a sprite for every monster in the initial book, so this is also a spoiler for some of "generation one" - at least for people who recognize them all :)
The 13 Demishades are now set to be the "starters" of the Mortasheen RPG, and the last one I've adjusted for it is Pteranormal, the demishade representing Ectosaurs. This just meant a little more outrageous of a visual "personality," and a larger head and torso to reflect that it's now a little bit smaller; something more easy to imagine as your starting companion.
Pteranormal's concept was always kind of a hybrid of a pterosaur with a Beetlejuice sandworm, and this has been played up a bit more, while also adding a crest to the back of the head that may remind you of another Beetlejuice scene, maybe!
I kept the tail and arms from the old art, because I was always satisfied with how they came out, soft and flimsy and almost vaporous, like the thinner tips of an octopus's tentacles.
This monster concept represents two major deviations from Mortasheen's "rules" thus far:
First, it's one of the legendary Boo Men, but not a bioconstruct; almost every monster class, some day, may get a Boo Man of its own.
Second, this is the plan for the Arthropoid entry, which means an Arthropoid outside the simple human-arthropod hybrid formula. This will be part of a subcategory of "Monstrous" Arthropoids, bio-engineered creatures that are all further scrambled from that formula, in most cases so much so that their components may be hardly recognizable.
Skratch would have aspects of fleas, lice and ticks, and even generate tick-like creatures from beneath its scales. The anubis-like shape plays into the fact that it sees itself as some sort of Death God in its mind, due to its mastery of a deadly insect-borne virus. This makes Skratch the Boo Man patron of all disease-spreading creatures in the setting, just as Drane represents the many brain-suckers and Stingg all the venomous monsters.
"Scimitor" was one of the earliest Arthropoid monsters, and in dire need of an update in time for the RPG!
It will however be renamed in its final upload, to "Zokar," as a homage to Zorak.
Borrowing colors from real mantids, it also follows some real quirks of mantis anatomy that are seldom portrayed in fiction, like the fact that a mantid's famous "scythes" actually terminate in the same clawed feet as its other four legs.
The complete text of its new upcoming bio is as follows!
Created by the hybridization of human and mantis, this dangerously clever and limitlessly patient hunter is a natural master of ambush and the art of grappling. Its unusually flexible joints, elastic muscles and lightweight body enable it to leap impressive distances, scale almost any surface and contort itself into seemingly impossible hiding places, while the accuracy and depth perception of its huge, powerful eyes are unsurpassed by even advanced technological means.
Slowing its heart rate and focusing its mind, the Zokar can go without food for an extended period of time as it awaits the approach of a suitable meal, at which point it springs forth with it elongated raptorial forearm and ensnares the prey in an arsenal of claws, spines and barbs. While its fine jaws can gnaw through most flesh with ease, it prefers to strike prey with a distinguishable head, immediately seeking to chew through the neck and decapitate the victim before it can strike back.
BEHAVIOR:
The typical Zokar is a calculating killer and somewhat antisocial loner that prefers isolation and silence whenever possible, especially to avoid the distraction of its seemingly unending appetite. Even when full to capacity, the monster is tempted to masticate any available flesh with or without swallowing, always tempted to find out what a newly encountered creature tastes like. It most of all enjoys the softer organ meats and especially the fattiness of brain tissue, which it typically saves for last as a form of "dessert," and many of its kind share a penchant for collecting the skulls or equivalent casings of favorite meals. Zokar consider cannibalism to be an extremely intimate act, though it is more commonly the casual consumption of some non-essential organs or a single limb that can be regrown over time.
A Zokar's drive to remain out of sight is similarly strong, even at its most sociable and relaxed, and it is apparently known colloquially to some human communities as a "Hide-behind."
APPLIANCE:
Zokar make equally effective personal guards or hunter-killers, and are also popular in pest control. Having no taste for vegetable or even semi-vegetable matter but finding an instinctive sense of comfort among foliage, they get along well with Botanical monsters and can become generally protective of plant life, often stationed to watch over developing Botanicals or even non-monstrous agricultural specimens.
TACTICAL MECHANISMS:
ACROBATIC: the Zokar is a maneuverable and lightweight contortionist, unimpeded by most obstacles and capable of squeezing into tight spaces.
SNAPPING CLAW: a Zokar's larger arm has incredible reach and can snap shut with deadly force.
MANTIS VISION: the monster's eyesight is more powerful than most other creatures, and provides it incredible accuracy.
Mumblegog, Gullywunk, and a further touched up Gezoond!
Something a bit different is being done with the final plagueman.
I deemed Mumblegog's existing art perfect as-is, so I colorized it without any design changes.
I remember adding the original Mumblegog to Mortasheen before plague doctors were even famous, it was so long ago! The name was goofy nonsense, rather than the meaningful joke names I usually do these days, so I gave the related species similar nonsense names. "Officially" I now consider these the names these creatures gave themselves, because their original intended names are possibly long lost.
Gullywunk is still inspired by a lawn flamingo, but I touched up its proportions, gave it more prominent hands and added a devilish tail, which to me calls to mind a little bit of weathervane.
Gezoond as I may have mentioned is now inspired by a chimaera, a deep sea fish, but also the shape of a Jenny Haniver. When it perches, its snout droops and it would look more like a toucan.
I also went back and made Gezoond's "valve" more impressive.
Specifically for "summertime holidays," though I had a tough time thinking of good ones; so here's a hot dog, one of those ash snakes, and a gelatinous organism that imitates a burst of fireworks, probably by momentarily flashing with light.
