1. What is it about the illustration of the Carrion Crawler? I remember being fascinated by it as a kid and now my kids are fascinated by it.
2. Eight tentacles! Yipes. Given that they are each 2 feet long and a Carrion Crawler is 3 feet tall, I would guesstimate that the spread of tentacles would be about 5 to 6 feet. Put a Carrion Crawler in the middle of a 10 ft wide dungeon corridor and you have a wall of tentacles coming at you. A Carrion Crawler hits Armour Class 2 35% of the time and with eight attacks each round the characters are looking at making a lot of saving throws.
For me it was the eyes. Those giant, big black eyes. I have seen a lot of carrion crawlers over the years, but this is the best and any that don't have those big eyes are somehow just wrong.
ReplyDeleteMy Carrion Crawler was more of a plant/cthonic merger than a tentacled insect but it achieved the same thing - 100% TPK.
ReplyDeleteIt always bugged me that the picture was 1 tentacle short...but that's my OCD talking.
ReplyDeleteI loved that picture as a kid (still do!). I dig the funky shading to the right.
ReplyDeleteHeck, I love most of DSL's pictures in the Basic book.
Centipedes creep me out, so I always had a place for carrion crawlers in my dungeons. Plus they are great dungeon vermin, you don't have to have a "reason" why they are in the dungeon.
ReplyDeleteVERMIN of most types creep ME out in general.
ReplyDeleteAs a kid, I don't ever remember stocking dungeons with the carion crawler. As an adult, I've found them incredibly deadly (as in, too dangerous for most low-level characters!) due to their multiple attacks. An encounter with multiple CCs should be enough to make most parties under 6th-7th level run to the hills!
This illustration for me really showed the Carrion Crawler's potential for porting into a sci-fi milieu.
ReplyDeleteI always liked this one too. The piece has an unexpected vibe of 70's modernism--the pattern of the background, and the Crawler eyes remind me of those shiny plastic bubble chairs by Eero Aarnio.
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