Ultimate slaad

Ah.  This is what I wanted this morning before I was thwarted by Google.

Tony diTerlizzi's interpretation of slaad.

This chap is both hilarious and obviously dangerous.  It was partly his illustrations that made me fall in love with Sigil and Planescape in the first place, so now when I think of slaads, I think of this.

And a swift edit to add another superb image of slaadi - thanks, Chris :)

More diTerlizzi slaadi

Slaadi and artistic rehabilitation

The slaad is much on my mind of late.  Creatures of chaos, lovers of entropy, beings with an unknown (and probably unknowable) agenda, slaadi are enjoyable nutbars.

They come in various flavours, and in the interests of finding a good image for this post, I googled them.  Hilariously, image search came up with the following as its first choice:

According to Google, this is a slaad.

Controlling my hysteria, I now present you with what I had in mind:

Actual slaadi, not actual size

There is something very beguiling about an utterly chaotic creature producing such a very random image. 

They are delightfully dangerous critters.  Part of their charm, of course, is that they look slightly daft.  Indeed, in the early days of DandD, they were regarded as a bit of a joke right up to the point that they infected you with some unspeakable disease.  Later incarnations spent quite a bit of time emphasising their horribleness despite their appearance, with successive artists working on making them menacing.  Largely succeeding as well.

This is a good trick if you can pull it off.  The immortal flumph is still waiting to become truly menacing, despite some good recent efforts.  For those unaware of this dungeon denizen, I present the original incarnation:

Flumph.  It falls on your head.

Not terribly scary.  The main danger has always been that an adventuring party is going to endanger themselves more by falling over laughing.  A more recent incarnation does somewhat better, but even so, the original is hard to shake.

Flumph you might be more worried about.

Returning to the original point of this post, one of my groups has just met a slaad.  We'll see how it goes for them.