Converting monsters from Dragon magazine

[Cleon]

Tactics: A yellow belly lies in wait on the sea floor, hoping to ambush prey. While they are not averse to direct attacks, they prefer to suck in smaller prey from a distance using their vortex maw.

What think you of...

A yellow belly lies on the sea floor and waits to ambush creatures that wander past. They prefer to suck in prey with their vortex maw, but are not adverse to biting creatures able to resist that attack. In either case, it seizes every opportunity to use its swallow whole attack.

 

[freyar]

Sure, that's a bit smoother!

 

[Cleon]

Sure, that's a bit smoother!

Updating the Yellow Belly Working Draft.

 

[Cleon]

Updating the Yellow Belly Working Draft.

How's this for the remaining "fluff"?

A whale-sized creature resembling a titanic tadpole with an extravagantly long tail. The beast is shiny black overall, with tranverse brown stripes upon its flanks and a bright yellow underside. Two pallid slit-pupilled eyes are set atop its massively broad head, which has an equally enormous mouth that reveals a white interior when it yawns.

The yellow belly is a sea monster so rare and mysterious that many scholars don't believe it exists. It only dwells in warm seas and spends most of its time lying camouflaged on the seabed waiting for a meal to come within reach, then swallow its victims whole. A few scholars theorize that the yellow belly are descendants of a giant prehistoric amphibian (such as mastodonsaurus) that adopted a purely aquatic lifestyle. The more excitable of those scholars theorize that, like an axolotl, a yellow belly might be able to metamorphose into a terrestrial form under the right conditions.

A yellow belly is usually about 80 feet long, but more than half of that is its tapering tail. It weighs 40 to 60 tons. [?]

 

[freyar]

Looks good to me, and I'll agree with the size info! All done then, I think.

 

[Cleon]

Looks good to me, and I'll agree with the size info! All done then, I think.

Updating the Yellow Belly Working Draft.

 

[Cleon]

Updating the Yellow Belly Working Draft.

So that's it for the Sea Monsters!

If the Creature Catalog website was working, we'd be able to update a batch of monsters.

 

[freyar]

Hooray!

 

[Cleon]

Hooray!

Do you have any preferences for the next Dragon magazine monster?

If not, there are a few I recall that I wouldn't mind converting, or we could let this thread rest for a little while.

 

[freyar]

Let's leave this one for the moment; I want to catch up on the others a bit more. We're taking a long time to convert these....