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Ekphrastic Beasts
Ekphrastic writing is the vivid, often dramatic description of visual art. This project is a full-color fantasy art book, featuring spectacular artwork from 6 of today's most exciting weird illustrators, that also functions as an artist-created compendium of creatures for the 5th edition of the world's most popular role-playing game.
Rather than revisit known fantasy tropes, we begin with four established illustrators each creating striking, startling, original artworks straight from the abyssal depths of the subconscious. Each piece is then given to our author to reverse engineer creature names, back-stories, and stats for them all!
The result: an artist-created compendium of stunningly illustrated creatures, spirits, and demons which have never seen the light of day or dark of dungeon before!
148 pages of entirely original monsters, complete with backstories and stats compatible with the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons
Rather than revisit known fantasy tropes, we begin with four established illustrators each creating striking, startling, original artworks straight from the abyssal depths of the subconscious. Each piece is then given to our author to reverse engineer creature names, back-stories, and stats for them all!
The result: an artist-created compendium of stunningly illustrated creatures, spirits, and demons which have never seen the light of day or dark of dungeon before!
148 pages of entirely original monsters, complete with backstories and stats compatible with the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons
148 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2021
About the author
Janaka Stucky
7 books80 followersJanaka Stucky is the author of The Truth Is We Are Perfect (Third Man Books, 2015) and the Publisher of Black Ocean as well as its annual poetry journal, Handsome. He is also the author of two chapbooks: Your Name Is The Only Freedom and The World Will Deny It For You. His poems have appeared in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Fence and North American Review, and his articles have been published by The Huffington Post and The Poetry Foundation. He is a two-time National Haiku Champion and in 2010 he was voted “Boston’s Best Poet” in the Boston Phoenix. He is practicing the perfection of effort through right action and joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.
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May 17, 2022Although the author is married to a friend and I'm sure I heard about this project around the time of the Kickstarter, I only picked this up recently when Stu Horvath of Vintage RPG mentioned liking it.
I'm on record here as being kind of tired with monster books. Like, I'm happy that some publishers are plundering non-Western traditions for their monsters -- the kids have to learn about world mythology somehow -- but so many fantasy monster books leave me sort of bored because the new monsters feel like re-skins of already familiar monsters. Tired of goblins menacing your PCs? Well, here's another humanoid monster with an interest in war and, uh, maybe they spit acid or something. It feels sort of like an Oulipo flipbook where people are just mix-matching the same few ideas. (Mind you: I would absolutely buy a truly Oulipean monster book.)
Other possible reasons that I might be bored of monster books right now:
(a) no narrative vision -- like, "monsters from Russian folklore" is about as close as we get to an organizing principle in these book;
(b) repetitive art style -- perhaps the flipside to there being no central vision; heck, even the Symbaroum books that I liked had a real coherence, but some same-samey art that made me feel it less as coherence and more as self-quoting;
(c) a real plethora of tentacles, pustules, or metal-machine-animal mashups; and also,
(d) I'm literally not running a fantasy game and so have no need for these monster. (Which I put last here because it's maybe the most important reason.)
Ekphrastic Beasts avoids a lot of these problems by having
* several artists with distinctive but not jarringly different styles, to the point where I often turned the page and then just looked at the art for a while to see if I could name the artist and how that fit into the rest of their work in the book ("ah, Ellie Gill's fairy tale influence is perfect for these bird's with skulls; ah Jeremy Hush's focus on faces is getting an interesting workout with this plant monster that collects bones and skulls; and here's Joe Keinberger playing with firelight here and moonlight there");
* the voice of a single author lending coherence, over and beyond the narrative coherence of how these monsters interact (i.e., several of the monsters here are part of a single storyline involving a fractious sibling gods and the exodus of a people who then met some extra-dimensional horrors which are now trying to break into the world, led by those returned exiles) -- what a delight to read a monster book that reads like it was the singular work of particular viewpoint;
* a lot of interesting, weird, exciting monsters -- even with the whole class of extra-dimensional horrors that seems very pustule-forward -- that don't feel like reskins or drop-ins for existing monsters but that in many cases, I know where and how I would use.
I've said before that (oh, hold on, distracted by family business, which does raise the question, at what age do you give RPG books as presents for kids' birthdays?) -- I've said before I tend to judge RPG books by how inspiring they are to me, inspiring me either to play, write fiction, or design game stuff. Obviously, this book does the job for me in terms of inspiring; and also this book's project hits a very tender spot in my creative urges, since I've been looking at some art for a while and thinking about how it could inspire some material for games. What I'm thinking of won't be anything like this book, but I'm really interested in trying after seeing how this book handles that interplay between art and game, the strangeness of monsters and the codification of game stats.
I'm on record here as being kind of tired with monster books. Like, I'm happy that some publishers are plundering non-Western traditions for their monsters -- the kids have to learn about world mythology somehow -- but so many fantasy monster books leave me sort of bored because the new monsters feel like re-skins of already familiar monsters. Tired of goblins menacing your PCs? Well, here's another humanoid monster with an interest in war and, uh, maybe they spit acid or something. It feels sort of like an Oulipo flipbook where people are just mix-matching the same few ideas. (Mind you: I would absolutely buy a truly Oulipean monster book.)
Other possible reasons that I might be bored of monster books right now:
(a) no narrative vision -- like, "monsters from Russian folklore" is about as close as we get to an organizing principle in these book;
(b) repetitive art style -- perhaps the flipside to there being no central vision; heck, even the Symbaroum books that I liked had a real coherence, but some same-samey art that made me feel it less as coherence and more as self-quoting;
(c) a real plethora of tentacles, pustules, or metal-machine-animal mashups; and also,
(d) I'm literally not running a fantasy game and so have no need for these monster. (Which I put last here because it's maybe the most important reason.)
Ekphrastic Beasts avoids a lot of these problems by having
* several artists with distinctive but not jarringly different styles, to the point where I often turned the page and then just looked at the art for a while to see if I could name the artist and how that fit into the rest of their work in the book ("ah, Ellie Gill's fairy tale influence is perfect for these bird's with skulls; ah Jeremy Hush's focus on faces is getting an interesting workout with this plant monster that collects bones and skulls; and here's Joe Keinberger playing with firelight here and moonlight there");
* the voice of a single author lending coherence, over and beyond the narrative coherence of how these monsters interact (i.e., several of the monsters here are part of a single storyline involving a fractious sibling gods and the exodus of a people who then met some extra-dimensional horrors which are now trying to break into the world, led by those returned exiles) -- what a delight to read a monster book that reads like it was the singular work of particular viewpoint;
* a lot of interesting, weird, exciting monsters -- even with the whole class of extra-dimensional horrors that seems very pustule-forward -- that don't feel like reskins or drop-ins for existing monsters but that in many cases, I know where and how I would use.
I've said before that (oh, hold on, distracted by family business, which does raise the question, at what age do you give RPG books as presents for kids' birthdays?) -- I've said before I tend to judge RPG books by how inspiring they are to me, inspiring me either to play, write fiction, or design game stuff. Obviously, this book does the job for me in terms of inspiring; and also this book's project hits a very tender spot in my creative urges, since I've been looking at some art for a while and thinking about how it could inspire some material for games. What I'm thinking of won't be anything like this book, but I'm really interested in trying after seeing how this book handles that interplay between art and game, the strangeness of monsters and the codification of game stats.
Displaying 1 of 1 review