#Fiend | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

risestarkiss · 3 months

Text

Rise Ramblings #537

Smart Leo is a super villain.

You can not convince me otherwise.

1K notes · View notes

dailyadventureprompts · 3 months

Text

Monsters Reimagined: Yeenoghu, Demon Lord of Insatiable Hunger

It's been some years since I did my overhaul on the lore of the gnolls and how they embody the weird de/humanization that goes on with various monsters over d&d's history. Ever since I've had more than a few folks write in asking about how I would handle the default Gnoll God Yeenoghu, who exists in a similar state of "Kill everything that ever existed" to Orcus and a good portion of the game's other late game threats, thematically flat and not really useful for building stories around.

For a while I've avoided doing this post because I thought it might skew a little too close to my personal philosophy, and risk going from simply being influenced by my views to an outright soapbox. I personally hold that despite being part of our nature hunger is the source of the majority of human cruelty, and if society and cooperation are the tools we developed to best fight against the threat of famine, it is fear of that famine that allows the powerful to control society and secure their positions of privilege.

I've also dealt with disordered eating in a prior period of my life, alternating between neglecting my body's needs and punishing myself for needing in the first place. I'm well acquainted with hunger and the hollowing effect it can have, though I'd never claim to know it so well as someone who went hungry by anything other than choice and self hatred.

Learning to love food again saved saved my life. The joy of eating, of feeling whole and nourished, yes, but there was also the joy of making: of experimenting, improving, providing, being connected to a great tradition of cultivation which has guided our entire species.

If I was going to talk about an evil god of hunger, I was going to have to touch on all of that, and now that it's out in the open I can continue with a more thematic and narrative discussion on the beast of butchery below the cut.

What's wrong: Going by the default lore, there's not much that really separates Yeenoghu from any other chaotic evil mega-boss. He wants to kill everything in vicious ways, and encourages his followers to do the same. He's there so that the evil clerics can have someone to pray to because the objectively good gods are on the party's side and wouldn't help a bunch of cannibalistic slavers.

This is boring, we've done this song and dance before, and the only reason that there are so many demon lords/evil gods/archdevils like this is because the bioessentialism baked into the older editions of the game's lore was also a theological essentialism, and that every group had to have their own gods which perfectly embodied their ethos and there was no crossover whatsoever, themes be damned.

Normally I'd do a whole section about "what can be salvaged" from an old concept, but we're scraping the bottom of the barrel right from the inset. Likewise my trick of combining multiple bits of underwritten d&d mythology to make a sturdier concept isn't going to work as most of d&d's other gods of hunger or famine are similar levels of paper thin.

How do we fix it: I want Yeenoghu to be the opposite of the path I found myself on, a hunger so great and so painful that it percludes happiness, cooperation, or even rational thought. Hunger not as a sumptuous hedonistic gluttony but a hollowing emptiness that compels violence and desperation. More than just psychopathic slaughter and gore, it is becalmed sailors drinking seawater to quench their thirst, the urban poor mixing sawdust and plaster into their food because their wages are not enough to afford grain.

This is where we get the idea of Yeenoghu as an enemy of society, not because violence is antithical to society ( I think we've learned by now how structured violence can really be) but because society fundamentally breaks down when it can't take care of the people who provide its foundations. Contrast the Beast of Butchery with one of my other favourite villainous famine spirits: Caracalla the grim trader, who embodies scarcity as a form of profit and control in to Yeenoghu's scarcity as suffering.

Into this we can also add the idea of the hungry dead, ghouls yes but also vampires, anything cursed with an eternal existence and appetites it no longer has the ability to sate. A large number of cultures across the world share the idea that the dead cannot rest while they are starving, which is why we leave offerings of food by their graves or pour out a glass to the ones we lost along the way.

On that topic, there's also a scrap of lore involving Doresain god of ghouls, who has been depicted as an on and off servant of Yeenoghu. Since I'm already remaking the mythology, I'd have Doresain act as a sort of saint or herald for the demon lord, the wicked but still partially reasonable entity who can villain monolog before the feral and all consuming demon god shows up.

Summing it all up: Yeenoghu isn't a demon you wittingly worship, it's a demon that claims you, marks you as its mouthpiece and through you seeks to consume more of the world. It gives you just enough strength to keep on living, keep on suffering, keep on filling that hole in your belly and feed it in turn.

The greatest of these mouthpieces is Doresain, an elf of ancient times who's unearthly hungers elevated him to demigod status. Known as the knawbone king, he dwells within a dread domain of the shadowfell, and is sought out only for his ability to intercede with the maw-fiend's rampages.

Signs: Unnaturally persistent hunger pangs, excessive drool and gurgling stomach noises, the growth of extra teeth in the mouth, stomachs splitting open into mouths.

Symbols: An animal with three jaws, a three tailed flail or spiked whip. A crown of knawed bones (Doresain)

Titles: Beast of butchery, the maw fiend, the knawing god

Artist

#monsters reimagined #fiend #yeenoghu #undead #deity

545 notes · View notes

fyeahygocardart · 2 months

Text

Yubel - The Loving Defender Forever

#Yubel - The Loving Defender Forever #yugioh #Yubel #ygo tcg #ygo #Fiend #I am still a sucker for the Japanese/German name #Yubel + Flame Wingman design is fantastic + the Super Poly aspect of the card is perfection #Cover card #DARK #Fusion Monster #yugioh tcg #Valentine's Day

471 notes · View notes

evilyunia · 5 months

Text

So excited to finally post this artwork for Chortiv zine i did some time ago!

OC Ranrys

#dungeons and dragons #dnd character #dnd demon #demon character #demon #oc #forgotten realms #original character #fantasy #fantasy art #art #artists on tumblr #fiend #dnd fiend

582 notes · View notes

sketchbot9000 · 25 days

Text

A servant of the Gods, Gelu fights for all that is good and just in the world!

...It's okay to use dark magic and blood sacrifices if you do so for the right side, obviously.

#friend #fiend #blood magic #like regular magic #but messier

246 notes · View notes

awkwardosthe3rd · 10 months

Text

Hi its been a lil busy so I've hardly posted here

but have some Janan

854 notes · View notes

jacktheeldergod · 5 months

Text

271 notes · View notes

venacoeurva · 5 months

Text

Tapestry for Kirsten on Ko-Fi!

-Reupload and usage rights permitted for the client only.-

#commissions #Raphael #bg3 raphael #cambion #fiend #bg3 #baldurs gate 3 #baldur's gate iii #baldur's gate 3 #artsyfartsyness #oh my god this looks so blurry until you tap on it on mobile wtf #tunglr why

203 notes · View notes

leidensygdom · 10 months

Text

The artfight continues, this time with CaptainColum's tiefling monk (Way of the Kensei), Ig'nailia!

I had honestly loved this character's design ever since I saw them for the first time so it was super fun to get a chance to tackle it on!! (Also, who doesn't like a buff tiefling anyways?)

Reblogs are super appreciated!

485 notes · View notes

fittingxivsongs · 10 months

Text

#ffxiv #final fantasy xiv #Fiend

607 notes · View notes

oldschoolfrp · 5 months

Text

Many of the library's books have abishai bound to them as protectors and prisoners -- draconic scaled devils from Tiamat's upper realm in the Nine Hells (Tom Baxa, Dungeon 29 featuring Randy Maxwell's AD&D 2e adventure "Ex Libris," TSR, May/June 1991)

#D&D #Dungeons & Dragons #Tom Baxa #devil #dnd #abishai #red abishai #scaled devil #Randy Maxwell #Ex Libris #fiend #magic book #magic tome #D&D 2e #AD&D 2e #Dungeons and Dragons #TSR #1990s #Dungeon magazine

208 notes · View notes

lucas-mp3 · 1 year

Text

KOBENI KOBENI SO MUCH KOBENI !!!!

my love my sunshine my world

1K notes · View notes

dailyadventureprompts · 2 months

Text

Villain: The Lauding Worm

Born of hubris and old glories gone rotten, this pallid demon of pride exists to parasite those that consider themselves great; Lurking in the walls of their ancestral estates, whispering in their ear, bloating along with their egos, inevitably driving them to cruelty and ruin as it's appetite and expectations grow ever larger.

Adventure Hooks:

The party are travelling through the wilderness when they encounter a richly attired knight exhausted and on the edge of collapse. After helping her recover, she shares that she is part of a noble family renowned for their legacy of dragonhunting, a life threatening challenge she must exceed if she is to honour her family and claim her inheritance. The expectation of this great and dangerous deed has worn heavy on her shoulders all her life, and has become all too literal now that the demon has invisibly coiled about her neck. Fresh off it's latest incarnation, the Lauding worm is small for the moment, feeding off the knight as she destroys herself for the sake of legacy and will not allow her to be dissuaded from her doomed quest. It may infulence the party to join her however, seeing the potential for gorging on greater glory should the dragon slaying succeed. It the aftermath of the battle, or perhaps some weeks later, the Lauding worm will convince the dragonslaying knight that the great do not share their glory, and that she must eliminate the party so they do not tell of her weakness in needing aid, or her shame in not striking the final blow.

Something is wrong with the king, and the whole realm suffers for it. Obsessed with building expansions to his palace he neglects the welfare of his realm and the stability of his court to empty the treasury into ever more elaborate construction. Brigands run wild, his underlings scheme and attempt to seize each other's territory, and all the while the king pours over the plans of his architects and demands they build more. The Lauding worm has gotten to him, it lives and grows in the castle walls, and the more the king builds the bigger it gets. The servants whisper of rumbling behind the walls, and though it is excused as the byproduct of the constant renovations, it's only a matter of time before the demon's growth exceeds what can be constructed and it breaks free to rampage across the land.

The Lauding Worm has a special reward for those who feed it best, realized only in the rare times it grows bored of gorging itself on the pride of others and seeks to enact its own ambitions. Taking the guise of a mortal necromancer it raises it's favoured hosts from their graves and turns their talents towards Conquest.

Artsource

#fiend #mid level #villain #villain demon #villain noble #random encounter #wilderness encounter #dragon #monster hunt

261 notes · View notes

fyeahygocardart · 8 months

Text