An artist painted a monster, an occult poet conjured it to life, and now it wants to kill your Mörk Borg character

In 2023, poet and performer Janaka Stucky crowdfunded Ekphrastic Beasts, an RPG monster bestiary with an unusual creation method at its core: instead of commissioning artists to illustrate pre-written monsters, Janaka collected artwork first and reverse-engineered the creatures from there. The result was a collection built for D&D 5e that felt less like…