Cacodemon's Ancestor

I found this years ago and showed it to some of the doomers on IRC, but I thought I'd post it for those of you that didn't see it yet. It's the cover of the AD&D Manual of the Planes and that looks like a relative of the Cacodemon. The name of the monster is The Eye of the Deep and it is in many of the old AD&D manuals. I looked in the monster manual from the 70's and it is in it. Also another enemy from another id game that was in an AD&D manual from the 70's was Shub-Niggurath.

http://www.acaeum.com/DDIndexes/SetPages/SetScans/ManPlane.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shub-Niggurath

Old.

yeah. that's one of the pictures that appear in the top left of this site.

Anarkavre said:

Also another enemy from another id game that was in an AD&D manual from the 70's was Shub-Niggurath.

But the point with Shub-Niggurath in Quake1 is that the whole Q1 monster designs are inspired by H.P. Lovecrafts descriptions of certain beings. You should know, you posted a link that refers to Lovecraft...

Vincent has mentioned that he calls the cacodemon beholder. I'm not sure what a beholder is but it might have something to do with AD&D.

xit-vono said:

Vincent has mentioned that he calls the cacodemon beholder. I'm not sure what a beholder is but it might have something to do with AD&D.

Rest assured that it does.

The monster pictured is an astral dreadnought, not a beholder. Look here.

Ancestor.

Tetzlaff said:
But the point with Shub-Niggurath in Quake1 is that the whole Q1 monster designs are inspired by H.P. Lovecrafts descriptions of certain beings. You should know, you posted a link that refers to Lovecraft...

Correct, and the reason Shub-Niggurath was in a very early D&D book is because they included the Cthulhu mythos in a compenduim about gods and stuff (and they had to remove them later due to copyright reasons.) Plus Sandy Peterson worked on a Cthulhu RPG before he joined id.

Also, that thing on the cover of the Manual of the Planes was just some nameless monster for the cover. Much later it was named and used as a monster for the game (Dreadnought.) The Eye of the Deep in the original Monster Manual is a ball-shaped monster with two eye stalks, one big eye, a toothy mouth, two arms with pincers and a weed-like growth on the bottom. The Beholder (a sphere with one big eye, ten eye stalks and a toothy mouth) was and is very much more popular and was likely the inspiration for the ball-shaped Cacodemon (other than the fact that the art is directly taken from the aforementioned cover art.)

Heh, this was so old it used to be on Doomworld's "Pic of the day"

"The what?"

Exactly

The same pic of the day that quickly turned into the pic of the day/week/month?

deathbringer said:
Heh, this was so old it used to be on Doomworld's "Pic of the day"

Wow, I actually remember that "feature"! The last one I can remember was a drawing by Fredrik featuring the marine, shotgun drawn, against a red background (was it a cave of some sorts?).