Rise of the Runelords

An avalanche of gnashing teeth, bone hooks, and worm coils roils forward in a wave of sundering parts. At the forefront of this thrashing, tentacular body yawns a howling pit of a mouth, ringed with a spiral of churning teeth and three massive, spiked mandibles.

The thing in the corner of the attic resembles an emaciated child. It is a gray, forgotten remnant with cobwebs and dust covering the leering, fox skull that serves as its head. In tiny, claw-like hands it grasps a stuffed child’s toy—a ratty dolly with pins in its eyes. Worse are the voices, the calling whispers that haunt the air, filling it with nursery rhymes, sobbing, and laughing at the same time, as if the air around the creature were alive with lost invisible children.

Although sitting on its haunches, this gray-green humanoid is still almost four feet tall. Two large, bulbous eyes sit on either side of its toad-like head, above a wide maw that holds a pair of sharp ridges instead of teeth. Countless tough warts cover its rubbery skin all the way down to its webbed hands and feet. The creature wears simple armor constructed from reptilian hide and turtle shells, and wields an immense spiked club.

A sleek aquatic hunter that looks some- thing like a seal with fins and a mouth full of several rows of sharklike teeth, the bunyip has learned that food often falls down from the hole above, especially when it roars.

A swarm of rotting ravens takes awkward flight. Their lifeless eyes staring, their mangy wings rotting, the creatures open their beaks to call but make no sound. Bits of feather and flesh swarm around them, buzzing like flies.

This gigantic spider-thing is covered in jagged red-and-black chitin. Many-legged and alien, the creature’s waving tendrils and serrated pedipalps twitch hungrily beneath a cluster of unblinking black eyes. Hooked claws at the ends of its many-jointed legs pierce the earth with every step.

Whatever terror of gigantic legs and venom-dripping fangs this arachnid horror once was could have been no more appalling than the undead remnant it has become. The house-sized creature’s wasted exoskeleton cracks and splits as it skitters forward with unnatural speed, and from the web of rotted gashes crisscrossing its bulbous body pour swarms of fat, poison-bloated spiders.

At first glance, this resembles a man dressed in a tattered leather robe, his head obscured by a dirty silk turban and his lower face swathed in a scarf. Yet closer inspection reveals odd bumps beneath the turban, something strange about how the scarf wiggles and writhes, and an awkward stance and way of moving that hints at limbs not wholly human under those weirdly twitching robes.

Beating its powerful wings, this massive multicolored bird circles purposefully. Its eyes are pits of greenish flame and its radiant feathers cause it to soar in stark relief against the comparably dull sky.

This is a thing of skin and dislocation and horror. A featureless humanoid shape with hairless, scaly flesh like a dark crimson snake, its long stretching fingers twitch and writhe. Its form is horrifically human, and yet at the same time frightfully pliant, evident when its boneless arms stretch out unnaturally, grasping what should be out of reach.

More than ten feet tall, this lumbering humanoid fiend looks to have been born of living ore and sculpted pig iron. A massive maw splits its prodigious belly and through the sockets of its eyes, flared nostrils, and both mouths flickers an angry glow, as if a furnace raged within the brute’s bowels. The impression is cemented as its jagged belly maw belches forth a blast of cinders and sparks.

An oversized lizard the size of a horse scans the area, its bulging eyes darting this way and that, completely indepen- dent of one another. Every few moments a long pink tongue snaps from its wide mouth, either to snatch up some unseen insect or moisten an eye.

This mangy dog’s face has the flat nose, beady eyes, and protruding teeth of a rat grown grotesquely large. Tiny clawed forelimbs and a long, hairless pink tail add to its verminous appearance, and the smell of sun-baked sewage practically steams off its patchy fur.

Blank white eyes, broad torn ears, and a wide maw filled with jagged yellow teeth and oversized fangs sway atop the body of this serpent. Combining the worst features of a rabid maniac and an oversized snake, scales that look more greasy than slick form a powerful, black, and limbless trunk. At the top, from its gray, lipless goblin head, flicks a long, thin, forked tongue.