Rann:  Here we go! Last part, we covered from Aboleth to Medusa. We saw some weird stuff, some scary stuff, and some stuff that Yuri harbored inappropriate urges for.

Rann:  And that porn compressed file I found you lurking around?

Rann:  Don’t try and make this about me. Anyway, when I start discussing tentacled horrors from beyond the world, just try to remember the horrors from beyond the world part, okay?

Rann:  Getting started in part four, we’ve yet again got a strong DnD standby, the Mind Flayer, aka illithid.

Like the Aboleth we started the last article with, these guys will rape you from the inside of your brain instead of from the outside. They’ll do the same scary shit of making you kill your friends and then enslaving you, but in a certain way it’s almost more terrifying that they don’t transform you into some faceless, near-mindless slave-creature. You’re still… you. Trapped inside yourself, going about your business looking like yourself, with your own memories, probably even your own clothes, but now you do whatever the inspiration for Davey Jones tells you to.

At least, until your new boss gets hungry.

The early versions of the Mind Flayer liked to shove their tentacles up your nose and pull your brain out through there to snack on, Egyptian-style. The last few iterations have done nothing so crude, certainly not. Instead they have a sharp inner mouth and acidic saliva to open up the top of your skull and pop it out from there. And keep in mind, what the Illithid is eating isn’t just a lump of flesh. It’s eating your thoughts, your memories, your feelings. Your whole life is consumed for it to sift through and laugh at your every misstep or maybe decide that your parents look tasty.

Well, either that, or they’ll use you for reproduction. And while some supplements have had them doing it THAT way, the typical way is that they take one of their tadpole-like spawn and shove it into your ear, letting it eat your brain and your thoughts and every time you ever felt heartbroken and the first time you kissed the person you love, until it gets up and walks around using your body, which slowly transforms into one of the tentacle-faced horrors you see above.

Nightmare

Yes, it is a literal night-mare. And it is called that not for the pun value, but because anyone that’s seen one is probably going to be waking up screaming during the night for the rest of their lives.

These things can run around and leave a giant wall of flame in their wake. They’re hungry to feed on your flesh. It can set whatever it strikes with its hooves aflame. And that’s not even the scariest thing about it. Know what the scariest thing about the Nightmare is?

The badass motherfucker that’s riding around on its back, because you know that bastard made this level thirteen encounter its bitch.

Ooze

This stuff is pretty much literally murderous hunger given form. All it does is eat and grow. It doesn’t think, it doesn’t feel, it doesn’t bother with such distractions as a skeleton or having a shape like any even vaguely natural creature. Realize, these things make stuff from the Far Realm look naturally-developed by comparison. That either makes them really ridiculous or really fucking frightening, depending on how you choose to look at it.

Of course, pretty much everyone’s familiar at least a little with the Gelatinous Cube. Particularly sadistic campaign planners have created trap doors that drop you into these things. You sink into it like you’re drowning in jello, and even as you are choking and dying on this thick, burning stuff, it’s dissolving you into your component proteins and turning you into just that much more ooze.

Fuck, give me an Illithid any day, at least it’s got a flesh and blood body standing on two feet, you can cut it, it’ll bleed, just don’t send me up against one of these fucking things.

Orcs

Orc orc orc.

C’mon, say it. Saaay iiiiit.

Orc orc orc.

Orc orc orc!

Rann:  What?

Rann:  Possible.

Anyway, moving on with our roll of the brain-breaking and wicked…

Orcus

This badass sumbitch seems to unofficially be the Big Bad of the basic campaign setting. Hell, he’s on the cover of the Monster Manual, instead of, well, y’know… a dragon or something. But he is one ugly mass of condensed evil,and he basically wants to topple the gods and twist the universe into his own little playground of sadism. This is the guy that’s worshiped by the evil undead because he’s just that cruel of a creature. His preferred weapon is a mace called the Wand of Orcus, and it’s made out of the skull of one of his enemies… quite possibly a god.

Orcus is a level 33 solo encounter. Orcus is worth 155,000 XP. Orcus hurts you with the sheer power of death just from you being within twenty squares of him. Orcus immediately brings anything he’s killed back to life as a high-level undead at the start of his turn. Orcus can kill you just by touching you. Orcus likes to laugh at the idea of someone thinking they’re tough because they took down the Tarrasque.

Otyugh

Lives in filth. Kills you. Buries your corpse in refuse and waits for it to get nice and rotted before eating it.

‘Nuff said.

Owlbear

This thing was put on that “list of stupid monsters” I mentioned last time, and yeah, on the face of it, the thing sounds ridiculous. You mixed up an owl and a bear, what the hell? Owls are practically harmless, and bears aren’t! It’s like giving a lion the head of a bunny or something, right!

Wrong. Think about it. Owls are only harmless to us because they’re smaller than we are. If they were just a little bigger than us, the phrase “Give a hoot!” would have parents screaming and grabbing up their kids, hauling ass for the nearest enclosed space. We’re talking about an aerial predator who’s famous among the animal kingdom for its night vision, with talons and claws that slice through flesh like a ninja katana in your favorite overly graphic martial arts movie. When you actually think about it, what they did was take a bear and give it bigger, meaner, more flexible claws, and a set of giant fucking knives for a mouth.

When you really think about it, the owlbear ought to have you fertilizing your drawers.

Rakshasa

Actually, I wanna know what the hell is up with these things. Tiger-men, okay, I get that. The way the tiger-men are, I get that too. They’re proud, fierce, but pretty much ruthless bastards that manipulate and twist other people into doing their bidding. This is what you’d expect of a blending between a predatory feline and a person, if you were of the sort to contemplate such things.

So what the hell is with the backwards hands? No, seriously. Rakshasa have their hands on backwards. Take a look.

So, seriously, what’s the deal? The only possible explanation the book itself offers is that they might have demonic heritage, though the hands aren’t necessarily tied to that, and I don’t ever recall a mention of a particular strain of demons with backwards hands.

So, off to Wikipedia we go! Wikipedia backs up some aspects of the book, up to and including the Rakshasa taking human form to do their trickery. (The Rakshasa in DnD are illusionists, since they’ve got more civilized creatures to pretend to be.) What the DnD book doesn’t mention is that the Rakshasa are man-eaters… well, the site calls them cannibals, but if they’re just eating humans and not Rakshasa, they’re not really, are they? They also seem to be more general petty bastards in their original connotation, doing all sorts of things like desecrating graves and eating spoiled food and killing people just to do it. (Which, considering they’re supposed to take on human form, probably means they were intended to be a slight on some particular minority or group in Asia.) At a brief skim, I see not a single mention of the backwards hand thing.

So, we’ll check the wikipedia on the fictional representations of them rather than the mythological. Looking through… nope. Not a single explanation for the backwards hands thing. Weird. Almost as weird as BACKWARDS HANDS. Or… something. Yeah.

Roc

Remember me talking about how owls would make people shit themselves if they were big enough to carry off children and small adults?

Eagles that can carry off your horse, muhfugger. Eagles that can carry off your horse. And they are not kid friendly.

Rot Harbinger

The bar is set pretty high for freaky undead things. I mean, the Atropal is pretty fucked-up and scary. How do you try and take Gold, or even Silver, in the freakish creature of unhallowed flesh given a monstrous parody of life olympics?

How about earning the nickname “Angel of Decay”, because whatever you touch starts rotting away like dead flesh left out in the sun? These guys make brown recluse spiders look like fluffy bunnies. (I dunno about anyone else, but brown recluse spiders scare the hell outta me.) While they’re not angels, or even made from angels, they’re related in a sort of odd way. See, the story goes that while Orcus was having himself an out-and-about, the gods sent a host of angels to try and slay him. Orcus pwned their bitch asses, as they say in the old language, and once he got home, he created these things to celebrate his victory, specifically creating them in the image of angels as a big ol’ rotting middle finger to everything that is good and true.

You gotta admit, Orcus is an offense to anything with a soul, but he offends with style.

Satyr

Ah yes, these figures of ancient lore, often used as a stand-in for unbridled human sexuality. As the book says:

Satyrs usually seek to “befriend” travelers they meet.

Y’see, “befriend” means “fuck”. (As opposed to some anime, where it means “to beat the everloving shit out of”.) Well, actually, in this case, the book does talk of stuff like getting you drunk, telling you stories, and so on, basically so that once they’ve got you asleep or all off-kilter, they can mug your ass. Or do other things to it, depending on how frustrated your DM is that night. (And yes, feel free to interpret “frustrated” as you will. Satyrs seem to “require” a lot of quotation marks to “get across” the double entendre of what I’m “saying”.)

Rann:  Then you’d have more in common with Emily. And frankly, I don’t need that sort of pressure, I’ve already got enough stuff in my computer that likes to incite my naughty bits.

Rann:  Moving on (again).

Shadar-Kai

Shadar-Kai are human(ish) people that worship and serve the Raven Queen, the goddess of death. (Who, despite all the sinister aspects ascribed to the Shadar-Kai… isn’t evil. In fact, it’s pretty specifically said in the PHB that she’s utterly neutral, because death comes in its own time to everybody, so what the hell, Monster Manual?) They’re power-hungry, ruthless bastards that have a tendency to go marauding and slaughter a kingdom or two on a moment’s notice.

In this edition of DnD: When Goths Attack!

(And yeah, the one guy is wielding something that looks an awful lot like an Ivy Blade. I’m guessing it’s actually just some variant on the [in]famous DnD weapon the spiked chain.)

Shifters

Yeah, see, thing about Shifters? They don’t shift. They’re descended from humans and lycanthropes, so they’ve basically got features like werecreatures, but they stay in that form all the time, like humans with animal-like features.

Just like furries. And some are horrible plagues on society that need a blade between the eyes, while others are really nice guys you’d like to have around.

Just like furries.

Rann:  Every comedian from Chris Rock to Carlos Mencia says I’m entitled.

Rann:  Aaaaaaaaaaanyway, moving very very quickly away from the whole subject of just how ethnic and/or fandom groups are allowed to be joked about, let’s move on to something even thinner than Ned’s comedy routine:

Skeleton

Skeletons are to DnD what ninjas are to martial arts movies, what Nazis are to action movies, and cops are to badass gun-slinging villain protagonist movies. They’re stock enemies you’re not supposed to feel a single bit of sympathy for dispatching. (The fact that cops have become these in a number of movies is a little disturbing, but that’s a whoooole other matter we won’t get into here.) Skeletons are even better though, since aside from most of them not even being sentient/intelligent, they don’t even have a face.

Scary, strange, and weird, yes. Faces, no. And that’s the best thing. I mean, I’m as big a carnivore as anybody. I’ll make a joke about taking a bite out of a live cow any day, and frankly, if it came down to that cow or me, I would suck that muhfugger’s big soulful brown eyes out of its skull to survive. But let’s all own up to the fact that for the majority of us, we find our meateating ways a little easier to digest when dinner isn’t looking at us. Same thing for fight scenes. How much clearer can your conscience be when you’re (often literally) beating the unholy hell out of something without a face?

Slaad

Rann:  It’s Battletoads!

But no, seriously, these things are high up there in the “fucking scary” running of horrific creatures that make you shiver just a little. Check out the bit of Slaad Lore with the lowest DC, thus meaning it’s the thing that’s easiest to learn about them in-universe:

Slaads use their claws to plant embryos in living creatures—an infestation known as chaos phage. These embryos quickly grow into slaad tadpoles that kill their hosts and give rise to new slaads. Afflicted creatures typically succumb to madness before they die.

Well, they do say pregnancy makes ya nuts!

(I’m sure someone had a faneurysm over the one Slaad with the Wolverine claws. I wish I could see it, because I usually find faneurysms funny as hell. You should have seen me in the time leading up to the Transformers movie, with all the threads wailing about the end of the world because of Michael Bay, Optimus Prime’s lips, Megatron not being pretty, and humans actually having something of a part in this war taking place on their planet, it was like I was on a three month ecstasy high.)

Sphinx

I am very disappointed. If I’m going to be asked a riddle and torn apart if i get it wrong, is it too much to ask that I be shown some tits for my trouble?

(By the way, guys, little tip. When the text for a hyperlink is “tits”? There’s a decent chance it’s NSFW. It’s a pretty easy critical thinking exercise, so if your company has a job opening due to you not thinking that one through, I think you can safely blame yourself and no one else.)

Swordwing

This thing is a Japanese-influenced monster if there ever was one. Not only does he look like second cousin to the Guyver, they also like to collect stuff. What stuff? Pretty much whatever the hell comes across their little brains and latches hold. Some of the examples in the book include weapons, gems, monster eggs, and victims’ hearts. So, basically, they’re your average otaku/comic convention attendant.

Seriously, though, one of my previous DMs, if he was any monster (and some sessions it felt like he was), he would have been one of these things. There was room for exactly four things in his room in the house we shared with several other people: bed, computer, him, and Transformers. And there wasn’t much room for him. This is kinda, almost comparable… to the stuff he actually had out and on display at any given time.

And wouldn’cha know, we wound up fighting one of those fuckers as a stand in for some kaiju-sized homebrewed monstrosity almost every damn week. You’ll excuse me if I sound a bit bitter, I’m still not quite over the fight against the half-pit fiend half-TYRANNOSAURUS FUCKING REX.

Treant

Also known as an Ent. You know these guys, right? Well, DnD has long borrowed heavily from LotR, but at this point, as once noted, that the two have long since gone their separate ways and that trying to reunite them would be a struggle in futility. So surely the Treant/Ent must be fairly distinct from its counterpart.

... Well that’s not even a little bit subtle.

Troll

Sorry, we don’t allow trolls here.

Rann:  Warforged

And, here we are. The Warforged, those shiny fun guys that Eberron first introduced us to. If the Dragonborn are Klingons, these guys are Robocop. Well, okay, they’re probably not Robocop because there’s no human brain or organic parts in there, but calling some massive, armored warrior “Mr. Data” just doesn’t have the same sense of grandeur to it, does it?

Warforged were a player race in Eberron, where they were, well, pretty unbalanced. They were written up as being identical to golems in most respects, and that included their immunity to things like poison and sleep and all that. It wound up with a lot of DMs houseruling them out of use. And in this edition, they are so far relegated to the Monster Manual, with only a small stat block in the back signaling that they could be playable at all. Which is a shame since they’ve actually been toned down this time around and don’t carry that giant list of immunities that made them so powergamey in the first place. (In fact, they only get a single stat bonus where most races get two, trying to balance out some of their other abilities.) Ah well, PHB2 for 4e is rumored to be hitting stores sometime before the end of the year, and rumors and speculation abound on just what it will contain, be it just other classes that needed more retooling time, or more races as well.

While there’s a few other guys worth noting at the very end of the MM that could probably have a bit written about them, I think the Warforged are probably just a nice place to wrap up. And for now, it will put a wrap on my DnD yammering.

Rann:  Was that a Python quote? Again?

Rann:  Anyway, before I go off to discipline my CPU, I want to thank everyone for indulging me in my natter about my geektastic love. Some of you (well, mostly one of you) were encouraging, and someone made jokes that were almost Ned-like levels of tired, but hey, thanks all the same.

Rann:  That’s it. *zap*

Rann:  Oh, I give up. Quote until your arms and legs fall off.

Rann:  Y’never had any to begin with.

Rann:  Bloody peasant!