Weird Monsters: Otyugh

Now comes the otyugh, one of the stranger occupants of the rogues’ gallery of strange Dungeons and Dragons monsters. The otyugh first appeared in the 1e Monster Manual (1977), and Echohawk over at En World has written up a pretty exhaustive history of the monster in the game.

The otyugh is an intelligent, telepathic aberration and an early attempt to rationalize the dungeon ecology through Gygaxian naturalism. The monster is part of the “clean-up crew” along with the carrion crawler, gelatinous cube, and the oozes. The otyugh, which may or may not have been inspired by the Star Wars trash compactor monster, is a scavenger that consumes a “diet of dung, offal, and carrion.”

It’s a fairly tough monster for a humble niche. The early artwork for the otyugh was not particularly inspiring: not even the great Erol Otus could make this monster very fearsome. The 3e Monster Manual (2000), though, finally hit upon a visual design for the otyugh that made the creature look like the alien monstrosity that it is.

This basic look was carried over into both 4e and 5e. Although there have been several licensed and off-brand otyugh miniatures over the years, I don’t think I had any before I picked up this Nozur’s Marvelous Miniatures version from WizKids. It’s a nice sculpt and a fairly straightforward paint. I airbrushed a basecoat of leather brown, then experimented with some of the Army Painter tones. The finished miniature got a layer of Vallejo gloss varnish.

I’m not completely satisfied with the results: the teeth are a bit more muddled than I would have liked and the gloss from the varnish is a bit too much even for a slimy sewer monster. Not quite sure what I need to do with these glossy figures.