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What the F*** Is Ekphrastic?

Ekphrastic writing is the vivid, often dramatic description of visual art. Our project is a full-color fantasy art book, which leads with spectacular artwork from 4 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!

The Backstory

When not sitting at a table, ravenously devouring junk food with your friends and rolling polyhedral die to determine heroic successes or tragic failures, some of the most fun we had growing up with roleplaying games was browsing the fantastic compendiums of monsters, which provided the countless deadly antagonists for our dungeon crawls and other-planar encounters. These phantasmagoria of fiends, ghosts, fae folk, and mythic figures fed our imaginations while the accompanying illustrations brought them vividly to life.

Decades later, we still love to browse these volumes and it's clear that all those years of monster immersion have twisted—er, *shaped*—our creative identities. Now we're ready to call forth new monsters from the fertile grounds of our imagination, using the artistic talents we've cultivated over the years to share them with you!

Stat Block

Written by Janaka Stucky, with illustrations by Jeremy Hush, Joe Keinberger, Ellie Livingston, Nathan Reidt, Arik Roper, and Skinner.

  • 148 pages of entirely original monsters, complete with backstories and stats compatible with the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons

  • Full page, color illustrations on every spread

  • Multiple beastly indexes in the back! (e.g. "Tentacles: pages 6, 9, 32")

  • Printed on premium 80lb. gloss paper

  • Black linen wrapped hardcover with gold foil stamp bound with coordinating headbands