Okay, that is not their name; they are “Disease Reservoirs” from Claymore Miniatures. But Claymore doesn’t appear to offer stat blocks for their homebrew creatures, so I had to hop over to my Wordsmith account and plug in a description of them to let their AI crank out a decent 5E stat block.

But, since I wanted to scare my players a little, and because I was using homebrewed stats, the creatures didn’t have a name–they were total cyphers to the players. Unfortunately, because of their appearance, one of my wiseass players started calling them “testiculons” and the name stuck.

It is of note that Claymore doesn’t offer painted examples (there’s a Discord channel but I haven’t seen much there) so there is no established color scheme for these guys. I wanted them to be obviously disease-related (they spew of gelatinous balls of goo that were then mixing in with the city’s water supply to infect the inhabitants). I had read a long time ago an article about what frightens people the most, and interestingly enough the answer was the juxtaposition of the living and the dead. This is why zombies are more frightening than skeletons. If I had just painted them all green, then they really would look like aliens, but the inclusion of a flesh-toned belly sack just gave them that sense of wrongness that seemed to really make it work.

I’m up to 48 miniatures now. What are your thoughts about the color scheme, and have you seen monsters neutered (no pun intended) by silly names? Comments welcome.