Sneak Peek Of New Character Concept: Charybdis!

I decided to take a break from posting the archival As Above/So Below art this week to bring you a bit of development art for the next Monstrous Liberation update!

So, a bit of backstory first: several months before Monstrous Liberation's initial early access launch, our publisher came to us with concerns that our starting crop of monsters might lead to us getting rejected from Steam. The specific sticking point was the trio of goblins we had planned for the Hospitality District - at the time, Steam had been having a bit of a moment where it seemed like an outsized number of adult titles featuring goblins were being rejected, and the publisher was nervous. So we said, okay, shelved the goblins, and repurposed another of our designs to fill the gap: Diogenes, the minotaur apothecary.

This worked out great, Diogenes was a big hit and we love his scenes, but that left us with a new problem: Diogenes had originally been booked to appear in the Scholar District, meaning that now THAT District was left with only two of its three monsters, and since the next update is set in the Scholar District, that bill has come due. We could, of course, pull the same trick again, repurposing an extant design from a yet-to-appear District, but that would simply be robbing Peter to pay Paul. Bringing the goblins back in unfortunately isn't really an option at this stage either - as they're currently designed, the goblins we've got simply aren't a good fit for what we've got planned story-wise. So, a new design was called for.

A lot of our designs in Monstrous Liberation are about trying to cram as many ideas as possible into one character. With Senza, we got both a classic demon pin-up babe and a hellish muscle-mommy. Drizzle gave us both a shapeshifter and a classical tentacle monster. Shrill can hot-swap her Parts. The remainder of our designs kick that idea into overdrive, and Charybdis really embodies that philosophy in quite a literal way. She's a marriage of a chimera and a mermaid, a magical experiment who lives in a large tank in the basement of the University of the Esoteric Arts. Among her constituent parts are a man-of-war jellyfish for her head and the majority of her hair, squid tentacle "braids" in front, one octopus-tentacle arm, another arm that's a sea turtle claw, and an undulating tadpole tail. And that isn't even everything! She's also something of a love letter to Davy Jones & the crew of the Flying Dutchman from The Pirates of the Caribbean films - her arm combo was actually "octopus tentacle and lobster crusher claw" until I realized that was the exact combination sported by Davy Jones himself. There's a fine line between homage and plagiarism!

I'm excited to bring you more looks at what's coming in the next update as they become available! I've also made this sneak peek available to all paid subscribers, so I hope you enjoy! See you next week!