C is for Crypt Thing

The Caves of Chaos are vast and deep.  Far beneath the earth they wend.  Here ancient tombs and mansions of creatures long vanished lie forgotten in the breathless dark, and  long, roads of echoing stone open suddenly on unknowable pits and gulfs and weird warrens peopled with nameless horrors. Here many powers plot their offensives against the fading kingdoms of The West, and seek to receive its champions into cold and nameless graves.

Construction of my AD&D miniatures campaign has been sadly neglected of late, but I'm going to continue to do what I can here and there.     

  Not surprisingly, I don't have my Fiend Folio here with me. I seem to remember the Crypt Thing of my youthful AD&D campaigns as being an active and enterprising monster who had a following of Thugs and assassins and who could be used by a DM to coordinate all manner of hardships and plot hooks for adventurers.  A good nemesis monster.  That's how I saw him.  Looking for info on the Crypt Thing online, however, I can only find what seems to be a new version of the monster which is a strictly reactive creature, a simple tomb guardian.  How boring.

Well, my Crypt Thing is going to be the kind surrounded by a gang of thugs and assassins who works actively to foil adventurers, kidnap fair maidens, cut holes in the bottom of everybody's boat and energetically plot to bring ruin upon bands of adventuring heroes.  

'Cause that's how I want it.

Here he is.  Citadel's old 'Skeleton Monk' figure.  

Now I just have to start building up his gang of evil human henchmen.