Mortasheen concept sketches to new TTRPG monster: The Bleedouch (Patreon)

The Mortasheen RPG is coming along faster now thanks to a lot of help from my friend and now paid staff member, Gigi or Gutsygills, who learned the beta system well enough to stat up hundreds of monsters before I even proposed she do so for the actual RPG book.  In finalizing the selection of monsters for said book, we wound up needing some creatures that could be common, "lower level" and much simpler than most, revolving around a single battle mechanic that they do exceptionally well; such as the mechanics we have for draining blood!

  Other bloodsucking Monsters in the setting were a little more complex or specialized, so I dug up one of my oldest pre-Mortasheen ideas for a creature I used to call "Bloodglug." This monster was from all the way back in my early teens, for a setting that never even really came together as anything but a generic fantasy adventure concept.   

The Bloodglug was simply a creature covered head to toe in red needles that could all drain blood, but I never did settle on a design for it. Revisiting it, I sketched a variety of urchin-like and blob-like creatures that felt alright, but not quite memorable enough yet.  I then came up with something a bit different; a monster not entirely needle-coated but with a large number of barbs and claws.

Thinking of it like a large "fish hook" I came up with a gnarled, anchor-shaped monster with lots of sharp outgrowths, slightly evoking a skeleton fish but more alien on closer inspection; a bit "buglike," even a bit "plantlike."

I thought of this creature as withering up into a mummified hibernative state, like a tardigrade or a rotifer, during which it blow around in the wind like a tumbleweed or tangle together with others of its kind into massive hedges, awakening again when it tastes the blood of some clumsy interloper.

I liked this and will probably still use it for another monster, but it was still a bit more involved than the "simple bloodsucker" I set out to do, and even the design felt too elaborate for that role; I really wanted something visually simpler, like a little kid could learn to draw.

I tried drawing some middle grounds between the "fish hook tumbleweed" and the simple "sea urchin blobs" I started with, resulting in fuzzy, prickly shapes that were almost rodent-like, with clusters of thorns for "ears" and a "tail." I gave these simpler cartoon eyes on the front, and all in all these designs began to remind me more of prickly "hitch-hiker" seeds, or burrs, which I've always had a fascination with. In fact, one of the first fan-made Pokemon I ever came up with was a bloodsucking insect that acted like one of these seeds, using claws on its head to latch on to passing creatures in a ticklike manner. 

 Simplifying it down more, I wound up with a monster resembling a round, prickly seed pod with additional pods as "ears" and a "tail," which really started getting an iconic "mascot-monster" feel to it. 

In the final design, I decided to resist the temptation to give this creature a more obviously "Tangela"-like void for a face, something I'd give to far too many more monsters if I didn't have any restraint, but its large eyes still fill a shared, almost squareish socket. I made its single pair of limbs a little smaller and brought them closer in to the body, to "distract" a bit less. I flattened the "ears" from balls into paddle-shaped appendages, and gave them large more obvious curved hooks, like a pair of crab pincers, that I could really see being difficult to remove, and finally I streamlined its body into a more teardrop sort of shape.

The name "Bleedouch" came fairly early, a play on "bleed out," replacing "Bloodglug" both because that doesn't have a catchy gimmick to it and because that name from the very beginning was a knockoff of "Bloodlug" from an obscure fantasy book (I think the "Lone Wolf" interactive book series?), which was a gelatinous mass of tubes.

All this was done before I even finalized the concept for the creature's lore, which I wrote after finishing the artwork, then Gigi gave it a functioning statblock using Mortasheen's beta rules: