Results 301 to 319 of 319
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2019-07-20, 10:06 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2019
- Location
- Magrathea
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
Red Caps carve their hats out of actual mushrooms, which remain alive after carving. The mushrooms then begin to spread spores, allowing Red Caps to passively increase the areas from which they can harvest more mushrooms for their hats. The spores also make it so that wherever a Red Caps was just standing is essentially covered with kindling for a moment, and anyone who is headbutted by the Red Cap (or otherwise gets a full whiff of spores) will suffer effects not unlike smoke inhalation.
An explanation of why MitD being any larger than Huge is implausible.
See my extended signature here! May contain wit, candor, and somewhere from 52 to 8127 walruses.
Purple is humorous descriptions made up on the fly
Green is serious talk about hypothetical
Blue is irony and sarcasm
"I think, therefore I am,
I walk, therefore I stand,
I sleep, therefore I dream;
I joke, therefore I meme."
-Squire Doodad
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2019-07-20, 11:17 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Gender
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2019-07-21, 06:27 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2012
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
Folklore had them as house spirits similar to some versions of kobolds and brownies, helpful for simple chores but also kind of *******s from time to time, so perhaps they could be the domestic form of goblins?
Short, hidden fey that live in or around houses and farms and help with chores, but occasionally become enough of a nuisance that they need to be driven out by exorcism and may try to resist violently.
I've mentioned it before, but the route I've gone with fey is mostly Celtic inspired with Germanic elements, so I just use hobgoblin as one of the words for kobolds, brownies and bauchan rather than trying to make them distinct*. They're all shapeshifters, all helpful at times and hindrances at others and all have certain payments expected in exchange for service and can be offended by accident leading them to become outright dangerous. They're set apart from other fairy folk by having struck their own bargains to stay in the world above ground when the others were forced below ground, and widely derided by the other fey for this reason, and outright hated by the more vengeful ones. A house with a helpful one is somewhat protected from things like kelpies and changelings.
*Though if I ever try to figure out the details of the various 'invader' factions (basically Norse, Romans and Saxons) homelands I will need to decide what their local house spirits actually are, since the fey are local to one area of the world. That's the issue of mashing together multiple mythologies I guess.Sanity is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
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2019-07-22, 03:21 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
I like the domestic goblin idea, also they being the same of brownies, for what i found there is little difference between them.
MM kobolds as such exist, but feels strange to call them kobolds, so because they don't have a dark counterpart as elves and dwarves have, "kobold" it's just as a tittle for nasty gnomes.
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2019-07-22, 10:07 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Location
- In the fiery pits of Hell
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
Dragons, being inherently magical creatures, cause the area around their lairs to become suffused with magic. Often the water, flames, earth, or even air will simply get up, stretch its limbs, and walk away.
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2019-07-24, 09:31 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2019
- Location
- Magrathea
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
An explanation of why MitD being any larger than Huge is implausible.
See my extended signature here! May contain wit, candor, and somewhere from 52 to 8127 walruses.
Purple is humorous descriptions made up on the fly
Green is serious talk about hypothetical
Blue is irony and sarcasm
"I think, therefore I am,
I walk, therefore I stand,
I sleep, therefore I dream;
I joke, therefore I meme."
-Squire Doodad
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2019-07-25, 08:29 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Location
- In the fiery pits of Hell
- Gender
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2019-07-26, 02:05 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
I understood it wrong, like this video inverted, with the dragons being the ones attracting certain kind of magic, so their castles and caves are formed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeK_hlwxYRULast edited by Xania; 2019-07-26 at 02:06 AM.
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2019-07-27, 05:22 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
Trolls may not exist, being actually young hags who failed to develop as such.
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2019-07-28, 05:29 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Apr 2015
- Location
- Paris, France
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
Full Life Cycle of the Gibbering Beholding Beast
Stage 1: Gibbering Mouther
As the 5e MM puts it so horrifyingly, the gibbering mouther is the composite eyes, mouths, and liquefied matter of its former victims. Driven to insanity by the destruction of their bodies and absorption into the mouther, those victims gibber incoherent madness, forced to consume everything in reach.
Stage 2: Gibbering Abomination
As presented in the 4e MM, the gibbering abomination is much the same as the mouther, except that it has developed tentacles, limited levitation, and at least one type of eye ray.
Stage 3: Gibbering Orb
The gibbering orb has developed full levitation, and half a dozen eyestalks able to produce a variety of eye rays. While it remains made of oozing flesh, it favors a spherical shape.
Stage 4a: Beholder
Eventually, through a combination of paranoia and delusions of grandeur, one of the trapped consciousnesses manages to repress all the others, which comes at the cost of the creature's maddening gibber. When this happens, all but ten of the eyes merge into a big central eye, able to produce an antimagic cone, while the remaining ten are mounted on eyestalks, with as many types of eye rays. The creature also merges all its mouths into a wide toothy maw under its central eye, then starts to grow either leathery skin or an exoskeleton. From then on, the creature is convinced that its new fixed form is perfect in every way.
The creature will occasionally regurgitate its recent preys in the form of a new gibbering mouther, thus repeating the cycle.
Stage 4b: Beholder-kin
Sometimes, the process that would create a beholder instead yields a weaker creature called a beholder-kin. There are many types of beholder-kin, such as the bloodsucking "death kiss" or the lobster-like "eye of the deep". Some beholders purposely raise and torture gibbering mouthers, abominations, and orbs so they become beholder-kin, which are then used as minions.
Stage 5: Greater Gibbering Orb
A beholder that does not stay sufficiently alert runs the risk of melting into a greater gibbering orb, the repressed consciousnesses reemerging as a cohesive group. The resulting creature possesses all the abilities of its previous forms, and has virtually no limits in its physical and intellectual growth. Some scholars believe that Hadar, the Ebon Hunger, is a greater gibbering orb that grew so big that it collapsed into a living black hole.
Illustration of stages 1 to 4a
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2019-07-28, 11:29 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Location
- In the fiery pits of Hell
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
When magic coalesces in a single place, spirits are born. Depending on the people, if any, living there and what people generally see it as, these magical creatures could be demons, devils, or yugoloths, or fey, angels, or couatls. People born in such places are planetouched.
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2019-08-25, 01:28 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2018
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
Worgs are undead, a punishment for murderous bandits.
They strive to collect treasure but, taking no pleasure in it. Worgs certainly cannotspend it.
they can talk and plan.Worgs will surround a rural farmhouse and demand tribute. Daylight doesn't kill them but they fade away and waking painfully in their caves.
worgs are resistant to normal weapons. They are vulnerable to silver, and such weapon attacks always have advantage.
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2019-08-25, 03:00 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Location
- In the fiery pits of Hell
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
Giants, including mutant trolls, ogres, and ettins (all of whom were bred in vats as warrior-servants), are an ancient alien race who came to the world through an interdimensional gateway.
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2019-08-31, 08:01 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
The "mountain giant" name brings the yeti to my mind, maybe they are a bigger and more peaceful variety.
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2019-09-13, 06:31 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2012
- Location
- USA
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
It dawned on me last weekend, that real life has something that could be considered akin to the giant rats of D&D and other fantasy games: a rodent of massive size that eats around ten pounds a day, the capybara.
Granted it doesn't look like a rat, but since when has a minor detail like that stopped anyone?Come check out my setting blog: Ruins of the Forbidden Elder
Inspired by LudicSavant, I am posting deities: Erebos, The Black Sun
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2019-09-15, 11:32 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Location
- In the fiery pits of Hell
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
I'm about to start a campaign where there is a dwarven communist party and a dwarven Russian civil war.
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2019-09-15, 05:10 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2010
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2019-09-16, 10:49 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2013
- Location
- Howard, NY
- Gender
Re: Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)
Last edited by jqavins; 2019-09-16 at 10:53 AM.
-- Joe“Shared pain is diminished. Shared joy is increased.”-- Spider RoninsonAnd shared laughter is magical
Always remember that anything posted on the internet is, in a practical if not a legal sense, in the public domain.
You are completely welcome to use anything I post here, or I wouldn't post it.
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2019-09-18, 12:38 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2018
- Location
- In the fiery pits of Hell
- Gender