Monster Manual Advent Calendar - Day 16

The Peryton

Now we're getting into strange mythological hybrids.  The Peryton is a beast with the body and wings of a bird and the head of a stag.

When I originally got into D&D the first two things I got were the red box D&D Basic Set and a copy of Dragon Magazine #80.  I was immediately hooked on Dragon as in those pre-internet days the magazine's content was a window into games and worlds beyond my immediate game group.  One of the regular features was "Ecology Of ........" a series of articles where in game academics such as wizards and alchemists would discuss various creatures inhabiting the worlds of (at the time) Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms.  If I recall correctly that first issue featured the Doppelganger but the a few issues later I got a creature I'd never heard of before  but became instantly fascinated with; The Peryton.  First of all the Peryton got in my head because it was the first fully developed fantasy creature I had read about that I didn't already have some sort of passing familiarity with from books or movies.  In addition two of the Peryton's special features struck then 12 year old me as so alien and terrifying that I immediately felt like it was one of the most malign and evil things in Dungeons & Dragons.  The first feature  was that it's diet was not the flesh of its enemies but specifically their hearts, that just weirded me out.  But the second feature (to me anyway) was pure nightmare fuel; the Peryton casts the shadow of an average man.  I don't know why but something about that relatively minor detail struck me as the most actively deceptive and evil idea I'd been exposed to to that point in my life.  To this day 30+ years later the idea that anything can cast the shadow of something else remains my most Lovecraftian nightmare.

This particular Peryton is from the Reaper Bones line and painting it has made me realise two things:
1.  I am 100% certainly going to use this monster in a game sooner rather than later.
2.  I need to contact the retailer I purchased this from and see if I can get the metal version to replace this guy.
This is unfortunately one of those cases where the Bones medium did not yield a great result on the finished product.   I LOVE this creature and this model  is certainly serviceable but I would really like to have a much crisper cast of this model to bring out ALL the detail.

-Jay