[Commissioned by @justicegundam82. The nagahydra first appeared in the somewhat infamous Serpent Kingdoms for Forgotten Realms in 3.5. Infamous because of the wacky balance issues; it was this book that allowed the exploits of Pun-Pun, a charop build that could become literally immortal by level 6 or so. The nagahydra isn’t that bad, but is pretty close, being originally able to cast one spell per head per round, with no restrictions. That’s a recipe for a TPK, even for a CR 18 monster, but I wanted to capture a certain amount of that flavor. I borrowed a level cap from the spell weaver, which will interact with the number of heads the nagahydra has in what should hopefully be a fun way.]
Nagahydra CR 18 N Aberration This immense serpentine creature
has scales of multiple colors and textures, and a ridge of spines running down
its back. It has five heads, each of which is human-like but scaled and fanged.
Nagahydras are among the most powerful of naga-kind, and perhaps the
most monstrous. They have five heads, which are frequently mismatched, with
scale colors and facial features characteristic of multiple species of nagas.
They have the hydra-like ability to heal quickly and to grow two heads if one
is severed, although accessory heads quickly die back, instead of remaining
permanently. Whether the transformation into a hydra-like entity was something
done by nagas or to nagas remains unclear—different nagahydras have different
explanations, if they bother to discuss this history at all.
Much like other nagas, nagahydras are gifted magic users. Due to the
flexibility of their spellcasting, no two nagahydras are likely to have the
same tactics or the same spells to draw from. However, they can cast multiple
spells at once, using multiple heads to intone different verbal components and
make arcane gestures simultaneously. A nagahydra that has grown accessory heads
can cast even more spells simultaneously, and some nagahydras with minions or
summoned allies instruct them to cut off a head or two to allow them to grow
more just before a difficult combat is anticipated.
Most nagahydras live in forest environments, particularly tropical
rainforests and tropical seasonal forests. They are carnivores and sit
comfortably at the top of the food chain, often choosing other monstrous prey
to consume for the sport of it. The alignments of nagahydras vary, but the
appearance of the heads they have does not necessarily reflect their
alignments. Some with the washed out purples and banded reds of dark and spirit
nagas are nevertheless good, and some with the golden scales of guardian nagas
are of the foulest evil. Nagahydras are skilled liars and clever
conversationalists, and even evil ones like to engage in riddles and stories.
Nagahydras have a single personality and motivation no matter their number of
heads, although they can engage in multiple separate conversations separately.
Okay, I’m going to need to hear about this Pun-Pun.
There were several different ways to build Pun-Pun, but here’s the basics.
1. Play a kobold with a viper familiar. This is so you both count as “Scaled Ones” for the purposes of Serpent Kingdom rules.
2.
Get access to Master of Many Forms from Complete Divine, a prestige
class that expands your ability to take options while wild shaping or
polymorphing.
3. Take the Assume Supernatural Ability feat from
Savage Species, which allows you to grant yourself a supernatural
ability of the monster you turn into with wild shape or polymorph
4. Turn into a sarrukh, the serpentfolk progenitor race from Serpent Kingdoms. Sarrukhs have the following ability:
Manipulate Form (Su) At will, a sarrukh can modify the form of any Scaled One native to
Toril, except for aquatic and undead creatures. With a successful touch
attack, it can cause one alteration of its choice in the target
creature’s body. The target falls unconscious for 2d4 rounds due to the
shock of changing form. A successful DC 22 Fortitude save negates both
the change and the unconsciousness. Sarrukh are immune to this effect.
A sarrukh may use this ability to change a minor aspect of the
target creature, such as the shape of its head or the color of its
scales. It may also choose to make a much more significant alteration,
such as converting limbs into tentacles, changing the overall body shape
(snake to humanoid, for example), or adding or removing an appendage.
Any ability score may be decreased to a minimum of 1 or increased to a
maximum equal to the sarrukh’s corresponding score. A sarrukh may also
grant the target an extraordinary, supernatural, or spell-like ability
or remove one from it.
The change bestowed takes effect immediately and is permanent.
Furthermore, the alterations are automatically passed on to all the
creature’s offspring when it breeds with another of its unmodified kind.
5. Give your viper familiar the ability to Manipulate Form, which permanently changes them.
6. Order your viper familiar to give you Manipulate Form, which permanently changes you.
7. Profit!
The
quickest way (in order to get this combo at 5th level) is if you can
take the Divine Minion template, which grants you wild shape as an 11th
level druid, which qualifies you for Master of Many Forms. But there are
many other routes. Fortunately, the madness has been preserved for
future generations (and to allow me to remember exactly how this wild
combo worked) on the DND Wiki here.
Pact demons. Based off of the crossroad demons from Supernatural. Made more for RP with the players as opposed to combat. These are creatures that have the ability to grant mortals almost anything, within the DMs discretion at least, but for a price. The price can be any number of things, from a small favor, to an assassination. I feel it really adds some fun options for players. And of course there are punishments for not following through with the deal.
Edit 2/27/22: Another one of my old posts that was a complete mess. Wrong numbers everywhere, looked awful. Tried fixing it up as best I could. Added in an awakened hell hound.
Adorable as this is, I raise you: Vlad makes these for a crying baby Riya one day because he doesn’t know how to interact with children unless he’s teaching them something.
She crushes the first few in her tiny, chubby toddler grip (and cries inconsolably about it), but by the time Vlad’s made ten, twenty, thirty of the damn things, Riya’s holding them delicately like butterflies. Her dark eyes shining in wonderment. Not just at the delicate paper bats, but at the person making them for her.
Vlad thinks nothing of it until it becomes a recurrent demand. He can’t so much as step into the same room without Riya squealing his name and toddling after him, pleading for more.
She loves them so much, Vlad makes a mobile out of them to hang from the ceiling in her nursery as a Halloween gift. Lady Margarete thinks it’s morbid and would prefer her to play with the porcelain dolls with the haunted glass eyes and frilly lace smocks she spent a small fortune on in Ingleton.
But all Riya wants is bats.
She outgrows the phase, eventually. As much as any little girl can while being raised in a castle full of vampires. Vlad tries not to be disappointed by this. He’d rather liked making them for her, but Tempus Fugit, and all that. It’s only natural Riya would outgrow him.
His fingers have a mind of their own, though, and sometimes he makes the familiar shapes out of habit. Leaving a paper trail of distraction around the castle. He assumes the thralls sweep them into the fire, and he’d be right. But sometimes Riya finds them first and pockets them, carrying them with her through the day until she’s able to retreat to the sanctuary of her bedroom and lifts down the silk-lined hatbox atop her wardrobe, revealing a stash of paper bats kept lovingly preserved inside.
They’re not much compared to the elaborate gifts Lady Margarete and the Count shower her with. But somehow, they mean so much more. Bats, as it turns out, are for (un)life. Not just Halloween.
i dont understand half of the words here but god if this isn’t the funniest thing i’ve ever read
im pretty sure red and blue weren’t programmed but just sort of… mutated into cartridges
Red and blue are why QA teams were invented
for fuck’s sake they weren’t badly programmed. They were bleeding edge. It’s so easy to forget that but Red and Blue were literally pushing the limits of what they could fit on the cartridge.
They used every trick in the book. In that way, the programming behind them is GENIUS. It’s frankly a lost art, in this era where hardware is insanely cheap and scalable, when you can just keep throwing more resources at the problem. But Red & Blue were when programmers had to get creative. Not currently using a piece of memory? Repurpose it, we can’t just leave it lying around. Only have a couple registers? Juggle them, keep careful track so we can restore them when we needed. Does this data need to be single purpose, or can we also use it for, say, a seed value?
And all this WORKED. I guarantee you 99% of children playing this never saw a bug in casual play. MODERN games are buggier by a landslide. Remember when X&Y came out and there was an ENTIRE CITY you couldn’t save in because it’d DELETE YOUR SAVE? Imagine that happening in the days of Red&Blue. It couldn’t have. I can turn on my red cartridge TODAY and have it work. And the bugs that did exist, those edge cases they missed? They produce this behavior because the game REFUSES TO CRASH. Sure, you can make it crash if you try hard enough, but goddamn it’s resilient. It just plugs away with garbage data in memory for as long as possible.
Y'all looking down from your 64-bit quad-core smartphones with 128GB SD cards like Red & Blue were programmed by amateurs. What, you also going to bitch that the Wright Brothers didn’t make a jet engine? These are artifacts from pioneers who wrote the goddamn book that others would use as gospel.
Sincerely, a pissed off goddamn programmer.
In case anyone is wondering, Pokemon Red is 1 MB. Not one of the images. Not its Pokedex system. Not its map. The entire game is 1 MB.
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ok but what if like. werewolves transform under the full moon but theres just this one and by day hes a big tough guy and then when he transforms hes a tiny dog. just fucking. just fucking turns into the tiniest, fluffiest dog
imagine that howling at the moon
imagine
Truly a ferocious predator.
And lastly: (He’s the pack leader obviously)
the big wolves are his younger sisters
Okay I’ve literally reblogged this prob a hundred times but it’s the best post ever so here we are again.
this has over a million notes and ive n e v e r seen it before what corner of tumblr did this crawl out from?
It’s wilder than that. You feel the temperature drop around you. Animals start to freak out cause they think night has fallen. Even more crazy is shadow snakes. Where you see the shadows around you start to shimmer. Kind of like the shadows of atmospheric disturbances you see during really hot days or near a fire.
My unga bunga ancestors, absolutely surrounded by shadow snakes during an eclipse
Also, the overall tone of the light is wrong and it’s almost impossible to articulate why.
It’s not dark per se, but the light doesn’t just seem dimmed, it seems like it’s in a different spectrum.
It feels like when a movie puts a filter over the film to indicate that something very very bad is happening, like an eldritch horror has arrived offscreen, and the bad light is slowly sucking your soul out of your body, only it’s real life, and the bad light permeates everywhere.
Imagine being a caveman and looking up one day to see the sky has gone dark and what looks to be God’s eye is starting directly at you
Pack hunting. flightless birds and angry, forever growing ice spiders. I tried writing up a good chunk of lore for them both so people could use them in their games a bit easier. Really like how they turned out.
