Art
Ten from the bestiary
From the 253-monster codex, ten from ten different families. What they are, how they fight, and why none of them has to be killed.
The bestiary holds 253 entries across twenty-seven families. Here are ten, one per family, to show the range: from an armoured blob to a chest with a tongue.
Each entry carries three pieces of data that are not decorative: its elemental affinity, its combat role and its family’s base mechanic. How it behaves comes out of those.
Metal Slime
Slime family · metal affinity · bouncer role. Slimes bounce, charge, leave zone slime and split or merge. This one is also heavy: it raises defence and shrugs off knockback. Hitting it feels like hitting an anvil that finds you funny.
Goblin Shaman
Goblin family · neutral affinity · caster role. Goblins move in small groups, ambush and lay traps. The shaman is what turns an annoying band into a problem: fail to silence him first and the rest last twice as long.
Crystal Stag
Fantastic animal family · ice affinity · wild pact role. This family is what gives the world its ecological texture: creatures that behave like real animals and have elemental evolution paths. The stag is not looking for a fight. If you get one, it is because you started it.
Mantis Blade
Insect family · neutral affinity · controller role. Poison, webs, leaps, swarms and zone control. The mantis is the one that tells you where you cannot walk, and it says so with two blades.
Glacier Elemental
Elemental family · ice affinity · caster role. Elementals apply status effects, carry partial immunities and change the ground you fight on. You do not beat this one with damage: you beat it by arriving before it freezes the floor.
Spore Cap
Plant family · poison affinity · controller role. Roots, poison, healing and natural traps. It looks like set dressing until you get too close, which is precisely the joke.
Banshee
Undead family · cursed affinity · attrition role. Fear, curses, pieces that get back up, and a weakness to light. It does not kill you in one blow: it removes your options until the blow arrives on its own.
Rune Golem
Golem family · arcane affinity · defender role. Slow, high poise, breakable parts. The whole family is built around one idea: it hands you enormous punish windows, but only if you know how to wait for them.
Chest Mimic
Object family · neutral affinity · ambush role. It pretends to be loot, waits for you to interact, and bites. Its card improves loot detection and ambush resistance, which is a neat joke: the thing that teaches you not to fall for it is the thing that ate you.
River Drake
Dragon family · water affinity · area pressure role. Areas, elemental breath, short flight and phases. It is the low rung of the family, and it already keeps you moving the whole fight.
What all ten have in common
All ten are pactable. Each can be bargained with instead of killed, and each leaves an essence card you can equip: the slime’s raises defence and knockback resistance, the stag’s improves ice resistance, the golem’s boosts shields and rune effects.
That turns the bestiary into more than a list of things that attack you. It is also the catalogue of everything you might end up carrying.
And there are 243 more.