You may recall that I mentioned last week that my youngest had started a new D&D campaign. And, if you’ve been reading for a very long time, you may recall that I mentioned, upon the occasion of said youngest child’s first real D&D game (a little over two years ago), that she had actually joined us for a game a few years before that, when she was 5 or 6. I was playing a Pact of the Chain warlock (in 5e slang, we call that a “chainlock”), and the Pact of the Chain grants your character a “improved familiar”—
So, for this game 4 or 5 years ago, when I chose a warlock who had made a pact with a Great Old One, I just took some of the bits of the imp, some of the bits of the quasit, gave it a bit of a tentacle-face, and tweaked a few things for flavor. I named the resulting creature Anjeliss, and decided she was a cheeky, indpendent creature who was my companion more than my servant. So, when my little girl wanted to join us, too young to really understand the rules, and not focussed enough to do much with the mechanics, I said to my other two kids, no problem: she can just be Anjeliss. She didn’t actually do much, of course (I actually made all the decisions about what actions to take), but she provided a little extra personality: basically, she was just roleplaying. Which is kind of the perfect way to start.
Now, I never imagined that she got much out of that session. She basically just sat in my lap and delivered a couple of lines here and ther
Now, my faux-Photoshop1 skills aren’t amazing, by any stretch, but I get by. So I found a quasit with wings similar to an imp’s (I believe it’s a Pathfinder quasit rather than a D&D quasit, actually), and I swapped out its head for the closest thing that matched the picture in my mind’s eye that I could come up with by doing a Google image search for “cute Cthulhu.” Then I color-corrected things as best I could to make the colors mostly match, and you can see the results at the top of this page.
I also did a monster write-up, including a standard 5e statblock,2 threw in some background flavor, and finally tossed in another image of the creature surrounded by all its alternate forms. I struggled for a long time with the naming of it: I wanted someting that started with a “Q,” since the quasit was its biggest inspiration; I wanted something that sounded Cthulhu-esque, since that was the vibe I was going for; and I needed something that wasn’t already used for some other monster in D&D (which is very hard to come by). And, as we all know, the Cthulhu naming convention is basically to use too many “X"s and not enough vowels, so I eventually went with a prefix of “qyx” and I tacked on a suffix of “ling” to imply that it was a little guy. The name isn’t set in stone, so it might change,3 but it’s what we’ve got for now.
So I took all that info, formatted it like a proper monster entry from the Monster Manual,4 and here it is in case you were interested in using it for your own games.
Enjoy.
1 I actually use a Linux program called the GIMP.
2 For which most of the credit has to go to a fellow on the Internet named Tetracube, who has a mad-easy statblock generator that I use for all my monster statblocks.
3 And my daughter has already pointed out to me that it sounds an awful lot like “quicking” when pronounced out loud, which is an entirely different monster.
4 For which I used my pro subscription to GM Binder, the absolute best way to to D&D homebrew write-ups.
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