Rise of the Runelords

A horribly deformed humanoid, hairless and emaciated, lurches out of the shadows. Its unnaturally long arms end in three-fingered talons, and its legs bend like those of a dog. A writhing network of bulging veins form dark blue patterns across its pallid skin. But worst of all is its face—its nose is little more than a pair of slits, and its eyes are bulging and red. The lower jaw splits in half at the chin into two wretched arms that end in tiny three-fingered hands to either side an open gullet with a lolling tongue.

A fearsome chittering heralds the approach of this morbid monstrosity. A giant headless scorpion-like thing of blackened bone and chitin rounds the corner ahead, scuttling along the wall as its two pincers snap ominously. A long grisly tail composed of dozens of chattering skulls arches up over its back. Some of the skulls are ancient and bleached white, while others are recent trophies still shrouded in rotting cheeks, their jellied eyes rolling madly in their sockets. A curved bony tip protrudes from the last skull of its tail, its deadly point smeared with poison.

The smell of wood smoke bears the taint of burning flesh. A branch in the campfire sputters and hisses. From within the fire’s embers a smoldering skull glares out, its eyes wells of cold darkness. Tendrils of smoke dance around and through it like tongues or writhing snakes.

Stark white scars and tribal patterns tattoo the dusky skin of this towering brute. Skulls, stone fetishes, and crude but deadly wooden weapons mark the nearly twenty-foot-tall savage as a deadly warrior.

The monster looks something like a leathery, eyeless squid with a squat body the size of a rain barrel. Its lower body splits into a tangle of tentacles the creature uses to slowly move on, while two longer tentacles, one thick and muscular and the other lithe and tipped with a bone stinger, emerge from either side.

An unnatural amalgam of loathsome animal parts, this mangy beast skulks forward—walking perversely upright—on the rear legs of a powerful horse. Its body and head grossly equine, the torn wings of some giant bat sprout from the thing’s pox-spotted hide. Calloused, milky eyes glare balefully from a nearly skeletal head as a rasping hiss escapes a muzzle filled with broken yellow wolf teeth.

An emaciated, almost skeletal humanoid thing ambles forward. The movement of its bones is clearly visible beneath its moldy green skin, its ribs pushing taut against thin flesh as if they might burst free at any second. The thing’s long spindly arms end in bony protrusions more than a foot long, which scrape against the ground as it comes. Upon its malformed blister of a head gapes an oversized mouth, which looks more like a yawning, infected wound set with broken, pointed teeth.

This tall, emaciated creature has pale skin stretched taut over bones that seem to push outward and threaten to split the flesh. Its head resembles that of a monstrous elk, but with deeply inset eyes gleaming with a feral, hungry light, and tattered, bloody lips that part to reveal jagged broken teeth. Humanoid in basic shape, the creature’s legs end not in feet but in blackened, charred stumps.

The specter of a horrif ying crone hovers several feet off the ground, her semitransparent body afire with otherworldly green flames. Her wild hair, tatters of ghostly clothing, and aura of eerie fire violently whip and waver, as if caught in some soundless hurricane.

Double the size of a man at its shoulder, this creature looks like a gigantic, starving jackal, but from its back beat the tattered black wings of a monstrous bat. A canine head sprouts from where it would be natural for one to rest, but behind, where the creature’s tail should begin, instead sways the sleek, strong coils of a viper, ending in a fanged head that arcs over the monster’s back. Twin trails of thin smoke, like those from dying embers, rise from where the thing’s jackal eyes should be, roiling up from depthless hollows gaping in the horror’s snarling visage.