It Came From The Bottom Of The Page

I read all the comments. Right now I'm combing backwards through the ones on the Alphabetical Monster Thing and writing down adventure ideas--there are a lot of good ones--check it:

Jeff Rients said... I've always thought of the Xorn as food tourists. The rubies from the Prime Material taste different from those back home.

I'd use the Xig-zag/Xim-zum combo with the Mutant Future radiation rules. The antimatter version would mutate undead only.

LurkerWithout said... I think Jeff Rients is on to something about the Xorns. Maybe worked gems and gold and stuff just tastes better than raw from the ground. So like a faceted gem is like getting food prepared by one of the people from Top Chef: Masters while just digging up your own is like just pulling stuff and eating it from the garden direct...

Eric M said... I like to think that Xorns raid the prime material for these things out of jealous rage, as if precious metals don't belong outside of the plane of earth.

Kind of like africans who protest blood diamonds, except they're unintelligent earth-monsters with mouths for heads.

Erin Palette said... It's probably poor form to toot my own blog and homebrew fantasy setting, but in my world of Pellatarrum, the Xag-ya and Xeg-Yi are alien, inscrutable "angels" and "demons" of the setting, as there are no gods and the people worship the Energy Planes themselves.

mordicai--
worgs, well. I basically just describe them as goblins who have been lobotomized & surgically altered to be quadrupeds, so other goblins can ride them.

Derek Upham said...

"The scariest thing about a giant wasp from my players' perspective is embodied by the "spider eater": that it will paralyze you and lay its eggs inside you, so that eventually you are eaten alive by its larvae."

*Temporarily* paralyzed. You are then mind-controlled into protecting the developing larvae.

http://www.damninteresting.com/mind-controlling-wasps-and-zombie-spiders

http://io9.com/5015317/a-parasite-that-induces-love-in-its-host

spiritoftherain said...

The coolest undead monster I've ever seen with the word wight attached to them are the ones from the Myth: The Fallen Lords series of Real Time Strategy games by Bungie. The official description of them is a "stitched-up corpse, given new life by dark magic as a breeding ground for virulent disease and foul decay." They're basically huge fat undead creatures made practically buoyant by all manner of nasty, virulent pathogens, barely contained by their huge fleshy bodies. Their only attack is to stab themselves in the gut and release the toxins in a massive, devastating explosion, and the same thing happened if you managed to kill them.

Wights were always trouble in that game; you had to make sure your army was safely away before sending out archers to blow them up from afar. And the fact that they could hide underwater meant that they could just creep up from behind while you were distracted and take out half of your army.

Norman Harman said...

When I saw "shriekers as spells" I thought of shriekers that cast a specific spell rather than shrieking when disturbed. Just the thing for a fungal forest fed from the wizard's tower effluent.

richard said...

There should be a "make shrieker" spell that you can cast on ANYTHING, that makes it grow a screaming mouth and freak players the fuck out. Also, "make unsettling whisperer."

( I like the following subthread fun merely because it's so typical. In a nice way. Jame being James and BigFella being BigFella...

Original entry:

Shambling Mound

The shambling mound is the DnD version of the Man-Thing. The carrot/tuber nose is the giveaway and makes it more like the Man-Thing than the Swamp Thing--who was invented a year later by the roommate of one of the guys who invented the Man-Thing. Both of these, in turn, derive from an older character known as The Heap and The Heap no doubt derives from an even earlier monster which I have no idea what it is but I'm a hundred percent certain that someone in the comments will let me know all about it as soon as I post this entry.

James Maliszewski said... FWIW, Gygax claimed that it was in fact the Heap, not Man-Thing or Swamp Thing, who was the inspiration for the Shambling Mound. Take that as you will.

BigFella said...
Regarding the Shambling Mound, there's also an old Theodore Sturgeon novella called "It" which was about a swamp critter formed around a submerged skeleton which I think was the inspiration for all of the moss men that cropped up mid-century. )

Charles Ferguson said... Stag-head-candle-guy = totally cool.
I imagine it with yellow goat eyes with those freaky black vertical slit-pupils, that maybe when you get up close you see are actually in the shape of hourglasses or stretched out inkblots that resolve into a shreiking face (probably your own). I figure its a Predator-style trophy-hunter: the candles are made from the rendered down fat of its most prized victims, and the flames are their trapped souls. Maybe it has a number of lives = the candles, and as each candle is snuffed out it loses a life? It would very likely flee by arcane means if it lost a candle, only to return (extremely pissed off with the snuffer for denying it one of it's trophies) to exact revenge & replace the candle with whoever inflicted the terrible indignity of defeat upon it.