The Innsmouth Look
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Yet another beholder variant (reusing an earlier sculpt!!!), the Eye of Shadow is from the shadow realm, and can turn invisible. And teleport. As if Beholders weren't nasty enough already! You know, I wish they made the Eye of Chaos variant, but ah, well...
An eldrazi spawn crouching over a floating mountain.
This is inspired directly by Magic: the Gathering, but as opposed to my Wandering Tombshell MOC, this one is not inspired by any specific card or art piece, but an expansion as a whole (two expansions I guess?). The eldrazi are mindless mana devouring monsters from the blind eternities and as cards they are represented by large colourless creatures. The whole eldrazi concept is pretty complicated and would take forever to explain, so whatever.
I made this MOC pretty quickly after making a tablescrap hedron, then made this thing in about a day or two. This is now my desktop background.
On one hand, this is ingenious. On the other hand, I can see it backfiring on the Mimic pretty badly. But now we have a new phobia anyway.
Very few people know that the head of Waterdeep's most powerful thieves' guild is a goldfish-obsessed Beholder.
Kraken Dice 14-pc set Signature Green, 30mm D20, Dragon Eye D20, Dice Market 7-pc set Apricot Swirl, a random mini and 6 Dice bags. Sets #354 and #355.
Kraken Dice 14-pc set Pendragon, 35mm Dragon Eye D20, 30mm D20, Blue 7-pc set, Kraken Dice 14-pc set Guinevere, Feytfull Raspberry GITD 12-pc set, and the extras. Sets #350 - #353.
A Beholder variant from 4th Edition, the Ultimate Tyrant is bigger than a pickup truck, and its eye rays are all meaner and nastier.
Certain trolls trained and bred for intelligence and martial skill work as capable (and huge) mercenaries and soldiers. The same treatment has made them resistant to fire as well, which is quite deadly.
Along with the haunted swamp motif, Ian Phillips also wanted his Beholder design to suggest Cthulhu, as he is a major Lovecraft fan.
This strange construct of bronze and brass and clockwork and gears can traverse even the deepest ocean depths!
After experimenting with many ideas including a fiery one, Kathryn Chodor decided to design her Beholder after the colors and fauna of the Underdark!
Steven Smith, whose Beholder design has inspired countless painters, specifically patterned his after a certain blue-eyed frozen-skinned villain from popular culture.
Before the world was, they were. Before demons inhabited the Abyss, they dwelt there. The Qlippoth are pure. Alien. Unknowable. Chernobou Qlippoth are writhing, gelatinous creatures of horrific fecundity, infecting all around them with living, writhing poison.
What do you think of when you hear "Baphomet?" Do you think of ancient conspiracies? The occult? The Freemasons? The Illuminati? That hermaphrodite goat with a pentagram? witches and black sabbaths? Ancient Babylonian religions? Secret teachings of the Knights Templar?
Nope. Turns out it's all a fraud. There is no Baphomet.
Firstly, goat imagery has shown up in many religions and cultures, and is often unrelated - from Herodotus mentioning Greek goat-gods to the Egyptian Banebdjedet, to more modern things, they are not necessarily related. Attempting to draw one unbroken line of conspiracies because a really common animal pops up as a motif really does not work. It would be like trying to claim that every rain/thunder god is the same. Most of the supposed links between them were made up from whole cloth in the 1800s. But aside from that, what is the origin of the name/demon/deity "Baphomet?"
The name first showed up in earnest in the 13th century, as part of a bunch of accusations against the Knights Templar. For some background, the Knights Templar ran afoul of the main Catholic church because A: they failed in retaking the Holy Land, and B: they ran a lot of banking and finance. If you haven't learned this from Jewish history, the people who run the banks tend to get killed often. So there was the accusation that the Templars worshiped the pagan god "Baphomet," often with their Catholic reliquaries claimed to be idols. In tracing back the history of the term, the very first mention of Baphomet that anybody has ever found was in an 11th-century French language accusation against the Knights Templar, from when the major persecution was just beginning. When translated, it says, "As the next day dawned, they[Templars] called loudly upon Baphomet; and we prayed silently in our hearts to God, then we attacked and forced all of them outside the city walls."
This doesn't say much, does it? Actually, it really helps, because surrounding literature can provide context. The Knights Templar had been accused of incorporating Islamic beliefs into their religion, though this was a fraud - the western European concept of Islam at the time was far different than the real thing. They thought, for example, that the god of the Muslims was Muhammad.
The generally-accepted spelling for Muhammad at the time (and for centuries afterward) was Mahomet.
The French statement was an accusation that the Templars were worshipping Mahomet, only they misspelled it into Baphomet.
Baphomet is a typo.
From there, it just sort of picked up steam as a nebulous pagan god that the Knights Templar were accused of worshiping - generally with no goat imagery or even anything more satanic than, "All pagan gods are devils."
In the 19th century, Eliphas Levi combined a lot of occultic goat imagery, including some ancient goats, the Sabbath sacrificial goats, the Goat of Mendes, Pan, The Green Man, Banebdjedet, and a particular nature deity worshiped in witchcraft that resembled a goat with a third, burning horn. He drew the hermaphrodite Sabbatic goat that is now famous today, and called it Baphomet, and claimed that it had always been worshiped, and pretty much made it the embodiment of the pentagram. In fact, this was the first time that the pentagram went from "random occult symbol" to "the sign of all that is Satan." Levi also supposedly based the goat sketch on a gargoyle he saw.
Aleistar Crowley took this and ran with it, declaring Baphomet to be his god and the "Mystery of Mysteries." And from there it just sort of spread into public consciousness as having always been the identity of any goat demon or god or belief that has ever existed.
Baphomet's identification with Freemasonry is due to the accusations of a man named Leo Taxil, who also claimed that Albert Pike (the man who made Freemasonry religious) called Satan God. However, Taxil was a liar, and even admitted as much before a public audience - he made up stories about the Masons to drive the Catholics into a furor so he could embarrass them later. The religious aspects of Freemasonry are sort of a Hindu-flavored Unitarianism, anyway. But the damage was done, and this only pushed Baphomet more into the public consciousness as a major occult figure.
So, there you have it. One misspelled name, a bunch of overzealous Catholics, and a couple of lying occultists. And that's where Baphomet came from! A TYPO.
Selected Bibliography:
First mention of Baphomet - 1098 letter by Anselm of Ribemont.
Partner, Peter (1987). The Knights Templar and Their Myth.
Read, Piers Paul (1999). The Templars.
Barber, Malcolm (2006). The Trial of the Templars (2nd ed.).
Barber, Malcolm (1994). The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple.
Barber, Malcolm; Bate, Keith (2010). Letters from the East: Crusaders, Pilgrims and Settlers in the 12th-13th Centuries.
Jackson, Nigel & Michael Howard (2003). The Pillars of Tubal Cain.
The Oxford English Dictionary.
Michelet, Jules, ed. (1851). Le procès des Templiers. II volumes.
Michelet, Jules (1860). History of France.
Wright, Thomas (1865). "The Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages of Western Europe".
Leo Taxil's confession is in a variety of locations. Here is an on-line resource: freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/taxil_confessed.html
The most feared spirit among the Algonquin people, the Wendigo is a primal demon of bloodlust and cannibalism, forcing people to devour the flesh of other humans. When one appears in its true skin without a possessed body, it is nearly unstoppable.
I think that this fae troll is meant to represent a Scrag - an aquatic troll, which heals when in water.
Billions of years ago, the Great Race of Yith were earth's dominant species. They built great cities with their advanced technology, and even learned how to travel through time by projecting their minds across the aeons into the bodies of others. In time, they saw their eventual extinction at the hands of the flying Polyps, and so transported themselves far into the future, to a time when the Polys no longer existed.
Viewpoints like this make me suspect the sanity of heroes.
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