Drawing Creature Inspiration From Unlikely Places

Our GM and I both have an abiding love for the Public Domain Review, an online journal dedicated to the wonderful detritus found in obscure—and often odd—books in the public domain. He posted a link to an essay by Ed Simon on the illustrated edition of Jacques Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire infernal, a compendium of demons from 1818 (illustrated later in 1863).  In browsing through the images, I realized what an amazing resource this might be to generate new creature ideas.  For me, the problem with coming up with a new creature to throw at players is having a visual aid...and these were ripe for the picking.  I mean, just look at this guy:

Louis le Breton, Amon, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire infernal

Sure, we've all heard of owlbears, but have players ever faced SnakeWolfOwl with Teeth?  In fact, Collin de Plancy describes Amon as follows:

great and powerful, marquess of the infernal empire. He has the face of a wolf, with a serpent's tail; he vomits flame; when he takes the human form, he has [male body but head of raven with dog teeth]; its head resembles that of an owl, and its beak shows very sharp canine teeth. He is the most solid of the princes of the demons. He knows the past and the future, and reconciles, when he wants, friend and foe. He commands forty legions [of spirits].

I decided I needed—no, MUST—stat this demon out this as a RPG creature. Because I've been mostly playing and running Pathfinder 2 lately, I chose that as my preferred system (and because I wanted to test out the guidelines for creating custom creatures in the Gamemastery Guide).

Drawing inspiration directly from Collins de Plancy's description and the image, my guiding principles were:

• This would be a lesser demonic form of Aamon, appearing as one of the creatures in his legion.
• The "full" version of Amon (spelled differently by intent) would be the humanoid version at a higher DC.
• A key attribute of it's attack abilities relies on the ability to "know the past and the future."

Without further ado, here is the creature stats for our SnakeWolfOwl demon, Aamon!  Let me know what you think in the comments.

Created using PF2e Monster Tools online