“Unique” Undead
Welcome to the third page of our ongoing romp through the Irish bestiary. I hope you’re enjoying it as much as Necromancer. If you’re unfamiliar with the Dullahan featured in today’s comic, trust me when I say that this eldritch horror is 100% worth the fangirling. Just check out his wiki description:
The Dullahan is depicted as a Headless Horseman, on a black horse, who carries his own head held high in his hand. The mouth is usually in a hideous grin that touches both sides of the head. Its eyes are constantly moving about and can see across the countryside even during the darkest nights. The flesh of the head is said to have the colour and consistency of mouldy cheese. The Dullahan is believed to use the spine of a human corpse for a whip, and its wagon is adorned with funeral objects: it has candles in skulls to light the way, the spokes of the wheels are made from thigh bones, and the wagon’s covering is made from a worm-chewed pall or dried human skin.
I don’t know about you guys, but if I’m playing a death wizard I want this guy on my team. At the very least I want to go to his doom metal concert.
The undeniably cool aesthetic is part of the reason for the critter’s international appeal. The Dullahan belongs to the same headless horseman tradition as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and any number of Japanese anime and video games. Grabbing bits of myth and stitching together your own monster is part of the fun of fantasy, but it doesn’t stop at reattaching a severed head.
As myths travel, they have a way of transforming and reincorporating into local mythology. It’s why we have the veela in Harry Potter, the bizarre dark elves from God of War, and even Tolkien’s particular take on dwarves. When you hit upon the right mix of mythological flavor and newly invented detail, you wind up evoking real world histories, but made strange and new for the sake of your own tale.
So for today’s discussion, why don’t we share our own favorite reinventions? Why are your elves different? What makes your dragons unique? Do you have a dullahan behind the wheel of a jet-black Cadillac, idling in the alleyways of your own original pseudo-Gilded Age aetherpunk metropolis? Whatever your borrowed critter, tell us all about ’em down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Thrice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
The Tooth Fairy from Pathfinder comes to mind – effectively little flying fey gremlins/goblins that steal people’s teeth. With pliers.
https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/036/591/068/large/damien-mammoliti-pzo2107-toothfairy-swarm-copy.jpg?1618078765
Love the art on those guys. Cracks me up every time.
Since my player group is composed entirely of ornithologists, we have declared that kenku can be any type of bird, not just crow-like. Additionally, the first long campaign I ran for them was dedicated to lifting the curse that forced the kenku to only mimic or copy things they saw. Long story extremely short, it was really good, a ton of fun, and probably one of the most emotionally impactful games I’ve managed to run.
In other news, we just ran Benedict Cumberbatch guess who. Thanks for the suggestion! It was a blast and one of my friends wants to copy it outright for her own game. We printed out 53 Cumberbatchs in total; Bendable Crumplezone and Bactrian Camelhump tied for the group’s favorite name.
Damn straight they can!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/restricted-races
Please, PLEASE find a way to share that with me. It sounds amazing.
I would happily pay dollary-doos for a version of this on DriveThruRPG or wherever. You could probably market it as “an addon for dragon heist” somehow.
Of course! I’m not going to share it monetarily because a. It’s very copyright-skirting and b. It’s at least somewhat your idea, but how can I get it to you securely? What method is best to continue this conversation discretely? Honestly, if you can perceive my email attached to this post, feel free to send me a message there and I’ll be happy to share it with you.
Waaay back in old school, when there were groups who played D&D and others who insisted to play AD&D i was building my world and got up to the “Tarrasque”.
Thing is I had a problem with it. if you go by the information in the monster manual it is a unique one-of-a-kind monster, never been more then one since time immortal.
yet although there is only one of him, a very detailed way to kill it was given, and i had the whole ‘stories from the place no one ever come back from’ vibe.
as in if it was alone and never defeated – how do you know how to kill it (or even if that method would work?)
So in my game world i had the history tell that in the early days when gods and primal forces fought al over the place, the one that made the Tarrasque actually made 3 of them. He then ordered them to annihilate all the humanoids, they refused and to make a point he immediately destroyed the biggest one of them.
(this is also a big ego boost to the final boss, the players would eventually have to go vs some1 who can 1-shot the Tarrasque without breaking a sweat).
the other two then went into a big long war Vs all of men..Humanoid-kind and eventually after years of battle they killed the smaller one. the last one went into hiding and is the one and only known Tarrasque who roams around to this day.
When you mentioned the Tarrasque, I thought you were going to talk about the IRL one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarasque
Visited Tarascon a few years back and saw him hanging out in one of the shop windows, just waiting for festival day.
Never liking that d&d elves were mortal, I took a step back towards tolkienism with mine; making them the ageless rulers of the realm. Turns out when the only way to inherit the big chair is to bump off the old man, you get a breeding ground for intrigue and assassination. Having defeated the dragons thousands of years ago, they rule over slowly crumbling kingdoms; trying to rekindle their glory against secret plots from within and the unending tide of calamities from without.
Tolkienism: the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of under-represented fantasy races in order to give the appearance of equality within a party.
Only occasionally have I run into something that there weren’t rules for or that I couldn’t make work as-is (looking at you, last week’s pookah).
Right now we’re in the middle of a 3.5 Oriental Adventures campaign that began overnight when my 17-yo son began dropping brick-sized hints that he *really* wanted to try out the samurai class. I quickly scoured old Dungeon magazines for every OA adventure I could find (about ten or so). The trouble is, they’re all 1st ed. AD&D. I can adapt most of the rules on the fly, but while some critters carry over straight to 3.5, others fell by the wayside. Finding the variant translations of the names, appearances of the stats, and so on has been an epic voyage of its own, not to mention the places where the original module writers themselves clearly cared more about a well-crafted story than what the AD&D rulebook said this or that thing should be able to do.
My favorites so far have included a canny Celestial Kappa (taller than most (3′), with human flesh tones, childlike features, shark teeth, and the shell of a radiated tortoise) with a Bronx accent straight out of Roger Rabbit and a cluster of martial arts maneuvers cobbled to fit what the plot required.
Another proud DM moment was realizing while running the finale of a mission that the originally scripted win-scenario was actually impossible: the monster was straight out of Myth, but its game version was invented by the author; the two spells specifically required to save the day don’t even exist in 3rd edition; the PCs were not OP enough to bulldoze a new path. Fortunately, there was an “Alternately, your players *might* try…” suggestion in a side-bar that immediately occurred to my neuro-divergent players. They invented a “when-our-powers-combine” solution that was even more satisfying, story-wise, than the intended ending. (“Wait, if *malicious* wish-magic created this entity, then what if–“) The best part was, I didn’t have to fumble about for a quick fix when I discovered my lack of preparation; it looked like I’d planned the whole thing from the start.
Once I finally get around to make the statblock, I’ll plop a Tarasque in my game eventually. No, that wasn’t a typo. I’m talking about [this goofy guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarasque#/media/File:Tarasque_in_Tarascon_02.jpg), not the world ending monster we all know and love.
But I will of course play with the homophony. Just to mess with my players. And I’m even going to do some mixing between the two. I’m considering having the Tarasque be the size of the Tarrasque, and with the same tendency to take long naps. Eventually it’ll wake up to realize people have carved an entire city in its shell and it’ll kind of take offense. Shenanigans will ensue.
Oddly enough, one of my parties is currently being stalked by a variant dullahan, though it has a scythe rather than a spine whip and rides an elk rather than a proper horse. It’s not a grim reaper type, though – the party recently captured an elven enemy, interrogated her and then got frustrated enough with her responses that they decapitated her with the Urgathoa-worshipping necromancer PC’s scythe before leaving her body lying around in the woods. And personally, I feel that if that doesn’t get you a headless phantom stalking you in search of vengeance, nothing will. So far, it has only shown up at the edge of the PCs’ camp, used its “say a person’s name to curse them for 24 hours” power and then run off, but after two or three nights of that, I plan for it to properly reveal itself. And, oddly enough, I expect it to unintentionally help the party soon, as unless they take very serious precautions, their next campsite is going to be surrounded by a small army of drow planning to take them out. But when a headless elk rider shows up while the drow are preparing their ambush, well… someone might start shooting early and accidentally give the PCs a head’s up. (The dullahan is not hostile to the drow, but THEY don’t know that.)
Speaking of drow, I tend to interpret them a lot differently than the D&D standard. Which is to say, they wear clothes. I also generally tone down the chronic backstabbing and demon worship aspects. I’ve had a group of drow that were basically Resident Evil’s Umbrella Corporation, a relatively structured organization that builds weaponizable creatures and then loses control of them. A drow PC I once played caused the GM of that campaign to treat the drow as an oppressed and resentful minority (though one with a history of extremism, violence and slavery). My big campaign has drow demon-worship be external slander/misinterpretation of the drow’s reverence for the Lovecraftian aliens that split them off of standard elves and gave them potent technology (including robots). Those drow grunts also tend to be less “totally selfish backstabbers” and more “soldiers who grew up impoverished and ill-educated in a totalitarian regime and don’t know any other way”, and the narrative considers the plans of certain elves to commit genocide against the drow to be evil. Lastly, my own campaign setting has drow along the lines of magical geneticists, asserting “racial superiority” not through purity but through diversity, breeding or mixing with anything that could increase their family’s power, magical or otherwise. Those drow are prone to scheming against each other, but their betrayals are rarely fatal – why kill a potential future ally/asset when your population is small to begin with? – and there’s actually a cultural inclination against inter-drow grudges.
I suppose if there’s a central theme between all of my drow variants, it is probably viewing them as scientific/industrial and trying to bend magic and genetics to their whims (especially in creating artificial creatures) as a contrast to normal elves who seek to live with nature and animals with minimal changes. I think that thematic dichotomy is sufficient to justify keeping them as “dark elves” rather than making them a whole different species.
Basically all of Scion is reimagining myths in a modern context, as the newly loosed monsters and gods adapt to the modern world. My favorites were probably Brigit’s (Irish goddess of fire, but also heavily tied to innovation in Scion) modern attire being a clear tribute to Rosie the Riveter, and Huitzilopochtli’s (Aztec god of war) looking for all the world like he had hunted down and killed a large number of basketball players, then carved their jerseys off and sowed them back together into a suit (the jerseys, not the players). Wildly off from their original depictions, but fun.
Moving back to the realm of D&D, I’ve done two interpretations of the Wendigo myth.
The first was extremely true to the myth (as I understand it), but I’d forgotten that there was already a Wendigo template for 3.5, and so cobbled together my own from the Shifter race, Lycanthropy (wolverine), Gheden (half-undead), and the Warshaper prestige class. His shtick is being able to replicate the horror move walk, where no matter how slowly he looks like he’s moving, he’s still always right behind you.
http://bit.ly/2lQQEeL
The second is Pollyanna, The Littlest Nightmare. She’s a much more tragic monster; her horror hunger is a curse that she can’t control and refuses to acknowledge, clinging desperately to the delusion that she’s still normal. She uses the actual Wendigo template on a Warlock chassis, with the addendum that she lives in the Plane of Dreams, and is extremely good at manipulating it to her will. This reaches its peak when she finally reaches the Dreamheart and is granted her truest wish: enough power to never be afraid again. Mechanically, this is my favorite template at work: Symbiotic Creature stitching her squishy but deadly caster build onto the tanky and mobile Dream Vestige monster, here fluffed as the souls of all her victims.
https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24809459&postcount=45
Just realized I didn’t make clear that those depictions of the gods/goddesses were my own invention, though inspired by the prompts in the sourcebooks.
I made my own wendigo in Pathfinder because the Pathfinder one is CR 17, which makes it kind of useless from a GM’s perspective, since you can’t really use it against PCs who aren’t powerful enough to ignore death and throw wishes around. I primarily used the Lovecraft mythos’s interpretation related to the Great Old One Ithaqua, rather than attempting a proper derivative of the Native American legends.
Actually is a problem i have. Probably should try that more. Reskining monsters or giving them a spin is something i should do more since i either use them straight or i use my own things. Elves in particular are something i really strive to do better. Liches on the other hand are something i changed since how they are, soul stored on a phylactery doesn’t work on the setting. I changed them to bone, blood and flesh liches 😀
I made a homebrew race that merges elf and orc. I have 3 variants for them. I call them…. Beans. I couldn’t think of a better name so I just used Bean as it’s fast to type.
Let me guess. The three variants are the Chow Sol’jer, the Boom’r, and the gunk’l’dunk.
One is kinda drow-like and live underground. They have Darkvision, Light Blindness, and Shadow Magic.
The second doesn’t realize that they are part elf and think they are full orc. They have Ferocity, a stronger bite attack, and some natural armor.
The third doesn’t realize that they are part orc and think they’re part human instead. They get Elven Immunities, Arcane Focus, and Stubborn.
For elves, for one setting where everyone was some kind of elemental kin (I think I’ve mentioned this one here before actually), I had the elf equivalent be “nature” elemental kin. So they were literal plant people (well actually they were part of a somewhat complex web of fey type creatures that were all technically one species…. though this was a fantasy world so they could also have children with regular humans too because… that’s just how you do sometimes).
Though other times I’ll go more for the sort of “alien & beautiful” type elf. Or have them be attune to the moon and/or stars… or something like that.
(I had this kind show up in the origin story of one of my Masks characters.)
For dragons… actually for the same setting as the elemental kin, I borrowed the idea from somewhere else (though I now forget where), that all dragons were just unique beings. I *think* I came up with the detail that the core defining thing about them that made them dragons was that just being anywhere near them it was immediately clear “oh THAT is a dragon”. A little bit of flavor I think makes them extra intimidating when you consider you might have that feeling even though you don’t know *where* they are.
For one D&D setting, the only two specific dragons I had thought out were somewhat homebrew (or they would have been homebrew had I ever needed to actually stat them out). They were two dragons occupied the same swampland that was on the edge of the feywild, the prime material plane, and the shadowfell and they were in a cold (but could turn hot any moment) war for control over it. One dragon was an amethyst* dragon and the other was a vampiric black dragon.
This was the same campaign as the ant hives one, so again the idea was the players would enter into that situation (probably outside of their control) and have to pick a side. Given how 5e dragons work, the whole swamp would become the victor’s domain and the connection to either the feywild or shadowfell would be severed and the other have a more dominant effect on the swamp afterwards. And the dragonborn of the party would gain a new breath weapon option. And the whole party would get to loot as much of the enemy’s hoard as they could carry away before the winning dragon/their minions finished bringing the items there back to that dragon’s hoard. (In function this meant they’d get more out of it if they’d prepared more containers to haul stuff away with or made better perception/investigation checks to find things in the hoard that doubled as containers. Also it meant they could take a “grab everything I see and just shovel it into containers as fast as I can” or a “look for specific things, but certainly get less total weight in loot” approach to varying degrees.)
*It’s worth noting that this was years before the relatively recent stuff where 5e has defined what crystal dragons are like. (Actually heck, a lot of my ideas for that setting and even first try at running that game predate 5e itself.)
Also a fun thing going on in that setting D&D, relevant to that swamp, was that I’d come up with a few homebrew “magical materials”. This would be the primary place in that game the PCs (or anyone else I suppose) would be likely to find what I’d called Planar Glass. A material that’s formed on the ground of lightning strikes in a place where the connection between two (or more) planes is very close/overlapping.
(The effect wasn’t crazy or anything. If made into a defensive item it helped prevent against effects that would forcibly move the wearer to another plane (so spells like Plane Shift, Banishment, or Maze) or if made into a weapon it just increased the normal crit range by one.)
Another Masks character origin story involved them coming from an alternate reality where demons look *very* much like cats and their whole deal was stealing color from the world. (A world of floating island, magitech, and everyone was anime-style animal eared/tailed people. I was pulling a bit of the aesthetic from Strike Witches.) (To be clear, this was an intentionally comedic/outlandish character concept. You can probably tell by the fact that I purposely gave them a reason to be terrified/paranoid of house cats. Though it would also be clear if you knew that their main “super power” was prosthetic jet-legs which they used for super speed/flight kicks and all their whole deal with all future planned power ups were going to be about being literally colorful.)
I believe I mentioned it before, but I’ve always liked the idea of Wood Dwarves- bark-like skin, leafy beards, heavy petrified wooden forts fortified by brambles and rock spires, protected by moats and warded against fires. Renown for their alcohol and vegetable/grain exports as much as their craftsmanship. They create safe passages through the woods for travel to facilitate their trade (and so the less nature-favoring races don’t clear cut their own), with hidden branches intuitive to them but nonobvious to outsiders. While far from isolationist, their communities are tightly knit and heavily prioritize their own over anyone not considered within that circle, and some settlements are more territorial than others.
A lot of common tropes wouldn’t be hard to translate; outcasts get “Ash” or “Cinder” instead of “Slag” added to their names, they’re the best at holding their drink still, Scottish accents (fitting for this theme- maybe they could be in an area inspired by the Emerald Isles?), stout and sturdy- though possibly elders grow to large size, their kind slowly growing taller until their deaths.
Quick correction: Irish mythology is the theme, not Scottish. This is why I shouldn’t compose posts on mobile/while multitasking.
Another good one that showed up to 5E in Ricky’s Guide to Spoopytown. (The book is actually Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, but my name is more fun) I love the 5E Dullahan, although I do think vorpal critical decapitations are a bad mechanic overall.
Honestly, if anyone finds homebrew stats for a dullahan, I would love to see them. Depending on who you ask, they can be ghosts, far, or their own thing entirely. I’ve seen a few interpretations where dullahan are repelled by gold, or can open/unlock/unbar any door in their way by snapping their whip. They’re very interesting folkloric figures, and I feel like they should show up in fiction more often!
The version I’m most familiar with is this guy:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/dullahan/