Manticore - Tumblr Posts

Each time our fantasy project underwent a lore overhaul, the story would always stop at “...and then the hero confronts the Manticore.” But that was 10 years ago. This time, we’re sharing our first look at our story’s first lead monster. ((I’ll have to bug Ismaire to find the original sketch, cos it’s wild to see how The Manticore’s final design turned out.))

Meet Masra Otto, a manticore who honestly was minding his own business while eating people (as you’d expect of a monster). If you were to ask Otto what his biggest regret was, it'd be not cutting off his villain’s monologue and just eating the damn witch who resurrected him. 

Guest OC: Vel Shego © @maunderfiend

@fantasycreechursandshenanigans

I've drawn more fantasy creatures lol

WIP

Sketches that I made for mlp X pokemon AU

Doshaguma, my favourite snarling wild beast.

I also want to add on that it has singlehandedly raised my appreciation for a mythical beast I did not care about before, the manticore.

It derives pretty strongly from historical portrayals of it (several rows of teeth, bald, humanlike face, reddened fur). Said manticore also gets beaten by mightier beasts, fittingly.

LOW POLY MANTICORE LET'S GO

Workin' on my low poly skills with a lovingly chunked Manticore!

I'm still planning on painting textures for everything, so what you're seeing now is just a preliminary vertex color pass to get an idea of form while posing. I debated whether to wait until texturing was finished to show this off, but it already took weeks to get here and I'm impatient lol. If ever whenever I finish the texturework I'll absolutely be sharing that!

In the meantime, vertex colors are amazing and powerful and beautiful and no I will never be silenced about them UwU

What's a low poly showcase without wireframes though?

Tri count: 945

(at least that's what blender is reporting to me, tho its accuracy is questionable... dunno why it's odd.) It's a bit high for reasonable N64 standards, but imma be honest: modeling low poly hair is fucking difficult. Especially with a character that wasn't designed to work in low poly from the get-go. I tried my best, but I'm still learning here!! >w<`

Concept art for a piece featuring a manticore vs a giant spider creature.

My big gay manticore gal, Mana ♥

Manticore Cyanotypes from college

Monster Gals through prompts

Say hello to my masculine daughter

deer jumpscare

Onward - character posters icons 

Don’t repost, like or reblog ♥

onward headers 

don’t repost , like or reblog ❤️ 

My DND character is a big strawberry manticore!

Why

just WHY

YOU COULDN'T HAVE MADE IT A FUNKY POLITE ONE???

Part of a fantasy character creation contest. 

OMG I LOVE THIS 🤩🤩🤩

If You Trust Me - An Onward Fanfiction

* All chapters now available on AO3 and WattPad! *

The magic is back…but at what cost?

When Ian Lightfoot unexpectedly comes upon an unknown talisman, it leads him and his older brother, Barley, on a path to try and figure out its purpose. But when they are unable to follow the traditional quest right away, the brothers come into conflict with each other over where to go onward. Ultimately, the mysterious magical relic will send both brothers on an all-new adventure that will test their relationship and bring them even closer together.

Archive of Our Own (AO3)

Chapter Index

WattPad

Table of Contents

~

Chapter Titles

(Spoilers Below!)

Prologue

A Mysterious Talisman

A New Quest Beginneth

School of Thought

Mr. Vance

Forging a Deal

The Medallion Report

Wanted

With or Without

Distractions

A Last-Ditch Effort

A Sense of Understanding

Uncovering the Truth

True Colors Revealed

Gedeon's Story

Power Play

Hard Truths

Disarray

Breakdown

A New Clue

Return to the Tavern

Magic & Inventions

To Grasp a Gremlin

Chant of the Lightfoot Brothers

Between Rocks and a Hard Place

Buried Feelings

A Chat with Trees

Dangarnon

The Hangar of Misfit Gremlins

Into the Caverns

Machinations

Lightfoots in Arms

Fire and Lightning

Reflection

Thank you for helping to solve something I've been wondering about for years...! (the manticore as it appears in RPGs and hence, popular culture). I still wonder where the wings came from 🤔

And as others have said, thanks again for running this!

Bestiaryposting Results: Mlekragg

Unsurprisingly, multiple people read the entry and immediately clocked what this was. (Thank you for not actually making a guess in text, so that people who don't recognize it are able to work without that preconception.) I didn't want to leave it out, because the mythological ones are fun, but unlike some of the others, the modern conception of this beast is pretty much exactly what the bestiary says.

Anyway, as always, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can find an explanation for this whole thing at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting. If you want to join in, the new entry for each week is tagged with "maniculum bestiaryposting" so it should be findable. This week's entry can be reviewed here:

Below the cut you will find the drawings responding to it, in roughly chronological order:

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) decided to branch out in an unusual direction with this one, in order to avoid drawing the creature they'd identified from the entry and also have some fun with it. I just think this is some quality creature design. Love the mask-thing, love the springy tail, and that's a really good rendering of a cuttlefish face IMHO. There's a really interesting explanation for all of these features, what inspired them and how it all works together, in the linked post, which you should go read.

@moonygryffin (link to post here) took a more direct approach, with the twist that the creature here is modeled on American fauna rather than ones the medieval Europeans would have been aware of. The body is a mountain lion, and the man-like head is a golden-headed lion tamarin, which of course comes with its own mane. I enjoy the choice to not use a lion lion, but rather two animals with "lion" in their name; also I've always thought lion tamarins were very cool-looking. For more details -- and an example of an attempt by MoonyGryffin to draw the same creature several years ago -- see the linked post. (Also thank you for providing alt text.)

@sweetlyfez (link to post here) has made an attempt to take the entry literally without drawing the creature she has recognized, which is a challenge considering how specific the description is. I think the decision to give it flea legs to help with that exceptional jumping is clever. SweetlyFez describes the result as an "awful creature" and... honestly I can't argue, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near one of these. In fact I think I'm going to wrap up this commentary and scroll down so I don't keep making eye contact with it.

@pomrania has also decided to go the route of "let's get weird with it", and avoided the literal interpretation by re-analyzing the word "has". This is similar to that style of joke one hears now and then -- you know, "he has the heart of a poet... he keeps it in a jar at home." (Incidentally, props to Mary Shelley for being perhaps the only person who could make that claim and not be kidding.) So this creature has the face of a man and the body of a lion, not in the sense that it was born with them, but in the sense that it keeps them as possessions. Very clever, and the underlying creature design is also fantastically creepy in my opinion.

@coolest-capybara (link to post here) mentions that she didn't recognize the description, and has given us this really cool-looking, rather menacing creature in their excellent medieval style. (This is why I insist on not naming the beasts even when it seems clear what it is -- this amazing piece of art might have looked entirely different if someone posted a spoiler.) I'm really struck by how it simultaneously looks like a patchwork sort of creature (different front & back legs, etc.) but all flows together into a cohesive whole. Just really well done, I think. (Also, thank you for including alt text.)

@cheapsweets (link to post here) has drawn the creature mid-leap, showing off its jumping prowess by shooting straight up into the air. I think this drawing does a very good job at combining human and lion anatomy to make something unsettling -- and the inclusion of the skull diagram up in the top left points to the amount of thought that went into this. As always, please check out the linked post for a detailed discussion of the design. (Also, thank you for including alt text.)

@strixcattus (link to post here) has drawn one that's oddly cute, and looks a bit worried. However, according to the description they've written in the linked post, this reaction on my part is probably going to get me killed, because apparently they're still quite vicious. I like it, though -- and, as always, I urge you to go read the linked post for this one.

On to the Aberdeen Bestiary... oh, we can't, actually. This is another missing page. So here's the illustration from the Ashmole Bestiary instead:

So, first of all, this is indeed the manticore, and I'm sure most if not all of the people who said they had guessed it got that correct.

Second, we can also note that all the artists who said something along the lines of "well we know about the issues of drawing medieval scorpions, so the scorpion-tail description doesn't need to be literal" were also correct there. Apparently this time a scorpion tail is just spiky all over, which I have to admit does look kinda cool.

Now let's address the elephant in the room. WHAT is that thing on its HEAD? My best guess is that it's meant to be a crown -- medieval art often sticks hats on nonhuman creatures with human faces, almost as if the artist wants to make sure you know it looks like a human head on purpose. I don't see crowns that often, though; usually it's just a cloth hat. (The one in Bodley MS 764, where I got the text for this entry, is clearly wearing a Phrygian cap.) I find myself unable to see it as anything but a daring hairstyle that is absolutely not working for it, though.

Anyway. The manticore is an odd one in its continuity here -- a lot of the mythical creatures in the bestiary have been changed, reinterpreted, or forgotten in the intervening centuries. I think maybe the manticore happens to have hit that sweet spot where it's popular enough that people remember it, but not so popular that it gets excessively telephoned through widespread transmission. I think a couple people noted that the Standard Fantasy manticore is more or less spot on to this description, and indeed, I can only think of one change:

(Art from the Magic: the Gathering card "Crimson Manticore", artist Daniel Gelon)

At some point, those bastards got wings. It's not universal at this time, but if you do an image search for "manticore", the majority of the modern ones are winged. I'm not really sure where that came from.

(Side note: I tested this by doing a Google image search, and one of the top results was a particularly odd-looking image, so I clicked on it out of curiosity. It was at the top of an... article? on a webpage I'd never heard of, and the opening of said article included the sentence, "In medieval bestiaries and art, the manticore was depicted with unique features such as paws, teeth, and fur." You don't say there, bud.)

Interestingly, the D&D manticore is slightly different from the description in an additional way.

Instead of a scorpion tail, it has a tail covered in spines. This has apparently been part of the D&D manticore since the beginning -- the above image is from 2e, but the 1e version had the same tail. (I just didn't use it because it's not as clear in the picture.)

Now, scroll back up to that Ashmole Bestiary image. The one where the tail doesn't really look anything like a scorpion's. Looks... similar to this in broad concept.

I doubt that Gygax or Arneson or whoever designed that aspect of their manticore after one bestiary image, so I popped over to bestiary.ca to see what else was out there. Out of the 38 medieval manticore images collected on that website, there are only two with a tail covered in spikes: the Ashmole manticore and one other that's clearly just a less-skilled artist working from the same image (it also has the same hat). Looking at the text sources, though:

"...it has a tail like a land scorpion, in which there is a sting; it darts forth the spines with which it is covered instead of hair..." -- Aristotle, De animalibus

"To the end of its tail is attached the sting of a scorpion, and this might be over a cubit in length; and the tail has stings at intervals on either side." -- Aelianus, On the Characteristics of Animals

Okay, that's the D&D version, mystery solved. New question: is it a coincidence that the Ashmole illustration fits Aelianus's description? Remember, the page is missing from the Aberdeen bestiary and the Ashmole bestiary isn't translated. The text comes from Bodley MS 764, which does not have a spiky-tailed manticore. My Latin is terrible and I'm untrained in palaeography, so I can't tell whether the entry there preserves the spiky description.

If any palaeographers out there want to solve this one for me, it's Bodleian MS Ashmole 1511, f.22v-23r, available digitally here. (I'll put some screenshots below, but I expect it's easier to zoom properly on the library's digitized manuscript.)

Okay, that's all I've got. Enjoy your week everyone.

Inktober day 8. Small shop.

Shakäste’s Ole Getty: The spiritual weapon...