Ummm . . .

(On things there are that I thought fit here to forewarn the Reader, part whereof may be necessary even for those who are in other things very well instructed)

Quietly, I parted the blinds — light eking in like a pottle of strawberries wherein you see the mold on the one, but in extracting it to toss away you realize the whole of them are gone bad (so too the light shortly distended and woke up the children). I began to type.

With an optimism composed of 3/4 alpine tranquility and 1/4 the modular arithmetic of January 1 emergent from December, I marked that I had, "returned from the driven well with fieldnotes" concerning mine own abandoned Dungeon 23, pledging to fill in any gaps remaining and continue the project to completion in this year of our Lord MMXXVI. 

Ha! Some field notes.

The jays were yelling at each other - so too soon were the kids.

Vern Wright

The ensuing months passed and although I dutifully wrangled each morning's unfinished entry (3 years later to the day,), the clues encountered were nearer sketches than schematics: "Hostile as hell" or "A fishbowl for the funerary set," interspersed with cut-and-pasted Marvel fanart from reddit r/PetRocks. Not super helpful, although perhaps it remains a good practice for a diarist to boil things to a thick gravy.

Ergo: 

Up betimes and to my office, where first I ruled with red ink my English “Mare Clausum,” which, with the new orthodox title, makes it now very handsome. So to business, and then home to dinner, and after dinner to sit at the office in the afternoon, and thence to my study late, and so home to supper to play a game at cards with my wife, and so to bed. Ashwell plays well at cards, and will teach us to play; I wish it do not lose too much of my time, and put my wife too much upon it. - Samuel Pepys, April 21, 1663

Wait til' she learns about old school d&d, Sammy!

(and as for embellishing the substitute frontmatter, printed dedications to "the Supreme Autoritie of the Nation — The Parliament of the Commonwealth of England" already reverted to the original "Most Serene and Mighty Prince Charles," I can only suggest to trust in God and an open Internet).

Francois de Laporte

I tried my utmost, but that the hook for the first catalogued ship of my multitudinous 12 mis-taxonomied "megadungeons" would be that it was upside down was indicative of problems to come with intelligibility. In a vacuum, an inverted ship is a semi-functional conceit, but it's a flawed opening gambit. Why was the ship upside down? Umm . . . a meteor? A magnet? A magentic meteor? A magentic meteor? It's a shard of an extra-planetary catastrophe lodged in the bulbous bow, pulling skyward? Skyward? Up and up and up?

Van-El — Father, can we go and meet Mother and Orna? I'm cold.

Kal-El — Van, it's . . . it's this feeling. I . . . oh dear Rao, am I going mad? I keep thinking that . . . Van, please, I know this won't make sense, but . . . you're my son. I was there at your birth and I'll always love you. Always. But . . . but Van, I . . . I don't think you're real. 

Darius Gilmont

Anyway, after 3 months of furiously refining daily entries and never hitting publish on anything, it was time to skip out again. Although I cherish the image of an entry a day, on the day, James Maliszewskian, I must bow before the reality of that J.M. I am not. I'm not even J.M. DeMatteis.

Let the January rooms come out on their own schedule, the February rooms on theirs, the March rooms. Let the April rooms . . . well . . . I quit the relaunch on April 1 already. Leave the April rooms for 2027. April, April, der macht was er will (and that shall be the whole of the law).

The boat isn't upside down at all, you see. It's out of sequence. The inhabitants are of different biological ages. Imagine high school, but the Senior class is from 1986, the juniors from 1956, the sophomores from this year of our Lord 2026. Also, the marching band is riding the teachers around like horses.

It's a generation ship — everybody sleeping for the rough bits where the waters lap the docks of the city states — Iscyra, Cyraxius, Saeculium. Run quiet and run still and that. But the robots keep waking up their charges on accident. You've seen this movie.

Stanko Tadić

JANUARY BOAT (revised) - CLUSIVIUS

The machinery tries to put the restive riders back in suspended animation, but it's stupid machinery and so they form little communities and hide away. All the factions are thus descendants of all the factions, and each turns the servitors to their own purposes. 

It was all going OK until the raiders started showing up.

The boat is inhabited by:

HOWLERS (Prophets)

# Enc 1d10, AC 7, HD 2+2, Att 1 (bite), Dmg 1d6, ML 7

ANOINTMENTED: 1 leader per troupe will use longsword instead of teeth. It is coated in a salve and is a +1 weapon whilst so coated.

The OGs who were first awakened. They are masked, superstitious, and violent. For reference, see the K'u J-meentajóob from Labyrinth of the Lamia Cerulean. Is this the afterlife? Certainly seems like it. They have turned their captured servitors into GODS (5% chance per # encountered they are also accompanies by a "god" - spindly little things, (HD 2, AC 9, Att 0). The howlers' ML goes to 11 if a God is present. They repair the servitors even as those thus fixed attempt to apprehend them and put them back in suspended animation.

MZNTRP

PINHEADS (Nomads)

# Enc. 1d6, AC 5, HD 3, Att 1, Net (dmg 0), Stomp (dmg 2d4), ML 8 

ENTANGLE with net/lasso to immobilize (1d4 rounds to escape)

SERVITOR STOMP - Once entangled, automatic hit for 2d4 damage.

Cowboys. They have turned their captured servitors into bovine "DOGIES" and eight-legged "HORSIES" moving through the ship looking for good grazing (electronic detritus).

Sometimes recaptured Howlers are awakened a second time and become part of a Pinhead posse. They regard the mounts with some degree of awe — like you saw a dog with the face of Baal Hammon all of a sudden. These SCREWBALLS refuse to ride such mounts — just as well, as they are generally kept lassoed due to their ecstatic and electric freakouts. For a comp think a 40k Weirdboy.

# Enc 0-4 (1d10-6), AC 7, HD 2+2, Att 1 (bite), Dmg 1d6, ML 7

SPLITFINGER - Magic Missile as level 3 MU once per day.

DORMAMMUS (Heroes)

Candlemen. # Enc. 1d3, AC 3, HD 5, Ml 7, Att 2 (soul knives), Dmg 1d6, ML 10. They have turned their captured servitors into pilot lights ("Moses baskets") wherein a dormammu can be re-lit after exhausting the fire. It is CRITICALLY important to keep to a dormammu he keep his basket hidden. They love to go around and demolish "all the eggs with their short-swords" like green Martians on a rampage.

SPELLCASTERS

Dormammus can work a variety of magics, but to do so diminishes their fire, exposing them to snuffing or to revealing the hiding spots of their machinery. They can cast 2 spells before recharge, the first as a level 4 magic user, the 2nd as level 2 - note, some of these spells are 3rd level, and can still be cast, but at half power). Further - after casting, their flame fixes at a color until it replenished. This is FIDDLY as various factions of dormammus have territories, and the woe be to him with the incorrect color flame: 

(as Ice T put it, See over there red don't go. Some places red's all they know)

1. RED - Mutagenic Scalding - Save vs. Poison or gain random mutation. Writhe around for 1d10 turns while the change takes place.

2. ORANGE - Charm Person - Watch the pretty fire baubles

3. YELLOW - Meteor Swarm

4. GREEN - Enervate - Draw your heat. Gain hp.

5. BLUE - Mental Prison

6. PURPLE - Vitriolic Sphere - It's a personal fireball only for you. Ouch.

Redundancy in such an environment is the critical, and a Dormammu is attended by (1d10-4) conflogracoyltes, # Enc. 0-6 (1d10-4), AC 3, HD 5, Ml 7, Att 1 (headbut), Dmg 1d4, ML 7, pinheads whose necks are extended to wicks — into which they can disperse consciousness in a crisis. Anybody who knows anything about fire will realize soon you'll have 1d6 identical twins and none of them will suffer the existence others — so this really is a LAST resort.

More rarely, howlers accompany the candlemen, significantly degraded by being awakened and put to sleep repeatedly. These slavering things are kept chained to each other and used for tracking, be it sniffing out cradles, sniffing out dopple-firers, or as warning systems for the machinery that will put their masters back to sleep (see CL-1: Dermacur Pack). The sound of their growls tells you more about their handlers than it indicates any recoverable nobility.

# Enc. 0-2 (1d8-6), AC 7, HD 2d4+2, Ml 7, Att 4 (bite), Dmg 1d4*, ML 10

PACK ATTACK: The pack can be thought of as one creature - chained together as they are, lose 1 attack each 1/4 of hp lost.

OVERWHELM: Each successful attack over the course of a turn does the next higher die of damage: 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10.

Redwater Vectors

GEMBUGS (Artists)

They aren't insects at all. They are the servitor bots whose vats are empty - either through earlier release, through initial vacancy, or through some sort of failure of the life-support systems.

No. Enc 1d6, HD 3, AC 2, Att 1, Dmg 1d8*, ML 11

STONE SETTING - On a roll of 8 for damage, the victim is frozen in alkalite and the Gembugs' goals change to removing said subject back to the vats to be preserved for the ships ultimate arrival. Save vs Petrification at -2 or be turned to stone as by a medusa. A remove curse will fix it, as will properly playing with the controls, but it's a bummer for sure.

There are no vestigial travelers with the Gembugs. All their attempts to resuscitate the vat-habitants were unsuccessful.

It's like the entire apparatus is broken, and instead of attempting to mechanically fix it, the servitor is going after the problem with paper and pen. Reality as a diary detailing reality. They would like you to sit for a still life.

They carry preposterous facsimiles of living things that they lean against the wall and pretend to speak to. They quietly hum the tunes of follow-up bombs to more enduring popular works. It's Lolotte Pov'piti Lolotte's cousin, Skip to my Lou, as interpreted by a youtube cartoon marsupial. It's Oasis, Be Here Now. Magic Pie, baby!

Scott Mackay

a0 - CONTAINER SHIP INSIDE OUTSIDE UPSIDE-DOWN

What we're gonna do right here is go back, way back, back into time. When the only people that existed were troglodytes...cave men...Cave women...Neanderthal...troglodytes. It's the first day of 2023 - hopeful hacks by the bucket lace up for their personal 365 days of megadungeon manufacture/drudgery. 

Ginny Reddington Dawes, writer of the "Coke Is It!" jingle, has just died. (and dig the sweet LLM writing about it - the author's "passion for the subject and dedication to research [made him] a respected storyteller in the genre" - sprichst du roboter? ...according to the WHOIS, said linked website also launched 1/1/23) 

Indeed, overnight almost GrAI goo commenced to swallow the land. 

I, being a dilettante, started and failed many times to maintain the requisite schedule of the d23. But, being a carrier of paper and pencil, returned from the driven well with fieldnotes.

Here's how it should have worked. I see your megadungeon and raise you 11, albeit sad little things of 30-odd rooms apiece, eschewing the map that's halfway the most interesting part of the project for a depth-crawl's sinuous blur. At every level down you roll an additional d6, resulting in a satisfying handful if you get down to level 5. Or, heck, stack the boats one on top of another and you've got 60 dice in a cup. Big counting.

Every month with the constancy of plastic gears a ship passes petite Yscyra. A ship ripe for the looting. Your team can decamp into its bowels, but beware! The object moves with the seasons. Week 1 yon ship is approaches, Week 2 and 3 passes, Week 4 departs. Once it's gone, you're gone with it, and the overland journey after you finally disembark, be it on the Lawfulgood side or the Chaoticgood side, is murder.

(good being a euphemism for "please don't slice and dice me). If you only play once-a-month, you better time-budget real world for a daring escape.

The basic boxboat is thus constructed:

0 - EMBARKATION POINT: 1

1 - The UPPERDECK: 1d6+1

2 - The LOWERDECK: 2d6+1

3 - The COFFERDAM: 3d6+1

4 - The BILGE: 4d6+1

5 - The ORLOP: 5d6+1

There's also additional d6 dice for the container:

EMPTINESS - On a 5 or 6. "Contrary to widespread notions, to be empty does not mean to be unreal, nonexistent, or provisional, nor does it mean that variety, plurality, and uniqueness are delusory or illusory." - Ted Biringer. So too, the empty room is certainly FULL of stuff, but it is stuff without consequence, and maybe not even then. Depending on your level of abstraction it disappears into itself or is free to employ elsewhere.

STAIRS - On a 4. Always going down until Level 5, where further down would be the water. You want stairs going up? Find the stairs you used last time.

TRAPS - On a 3.

TERMINALS - On a 2. Ostensibly why you, my dear JACKALWERE, are here. If the team can hold the door, a dogboy can extract from the Lupine Geometries items wonderous and fair. More like "two-minals, amrite?"

ONES - On a 1. Unity. A dice roll that changes the thing into itself.

The SUPERSTRING OGRE - If you roll the same result as where you already were (say a pair of sequential 13s), other boats begin to leak into this one. The room is in your current boxboat but is also in the other one. Alternately, any room of this number anywhere could be used. My double 13s here gets me Patrick Wetmore's ASE Level One (Dungeon Highway) "Storage Closet" with rusty bucket and brittle broom. Outside, you can hear "screechmen" on the hunt. They will be just as surprised as you if you let them through.

PATULTIUS. The boat is clearly upside down, it's keel in the air like a dead goldfish. Level 1 is thus played out on a curved surface - very unstable. 

FACTIONS

Acephiliers              
aka Pinheads aka Gauchos

Homonoculi riding headless humanoids. Chivalrous, after their own fashion.

Bejeweled                
aka Gembugs aka Treasure Type L-thropods

Insects concerned primarily with the gathering of glittering objects, which they insert into their shells and glue with spit. Shiny.

C. M. Kosemen

Hesperocyrines       
aka Howlers aka Snarling Jarlings

Spillover from the Wolf Planes - their longhouse on a-16 the equivalent of a crashed spaceship. Humanoid, but lupine - wererats minus the rat.

Melvyn Grant (via 70s Sci Fi Art)

Phlogisktonesia      
aka Dormammu aka Candle Romans

Aristocratic courtiers attended by rub-red thralls. Each keeps a life-fire at a different location (roll 1d30+1) and under heavy illusion - cannot be killed without extinguishing this first. They are all looking for their rival's fires to extinguish. The machine in a-31 is their dumb king to whom they prostrate themselves jockeying for position.

Darryl Young

Table of Contents

embarkation point

1    DID YOU FORGET THAT SOMEONE WAS IN THERE WITH A GOD**** LAZ CANNON?

upperdorlop

2     the SKIZO

3     RELEASE THE HOUNDS

4     BAD CODE

5     THIS CARGO is BEYOND ANY OF YOU

6     ESCALERA CALAVERA

7     DIVING BELLE

lowerdilge

8     HOSTILE JUVENILES

9     CHOP SHOP

10   GELATINOUS SUN

11    SOILAMANDERS

12    MUD INCANDESCENT

13    BARROWBIRDS

cofferdam/pivot

14    MIRROR LIZARD

15    DRUMS FROM the DEEPHOUSE

16    AEGISTHUS on a GOLDEN ISTHUMS

17    ASCETICHEDRONS

18    WITCH PITCH

19    the BLABBERMOUTH

bilgedeck

20    BOOK DEPOSITORY

21    LAB LEAK HYPOTHESIS

22    the ALCHEMIST AL-MIRAJ

23    JANUS TERMINAL (MARCHOSIA in WOLF'S CLOTHING)

24    JOUSTING PINHEADS

25    VROCK and ROLL

orlopupper

26    SHESEKRUSTPANKH

27    OIL STARVATION of the LAW

28    FAULTY SYNTAX and GRAMR

29    RECOMBINANT CHIMERAMEN

30    HOLE in the BUCKET

31    MAGNETIC REVERSAL

Mario Sanchez Nevado

"'Ah! dear madam,' answered Little Thumb (who, as well as his brothers, was trembling all over), 'what shall we do? If you refuse to let us sleep here then the wolves of the forest surely will devour us tonight. We would prefer the gentleman to eat us...'" - Charles Perrault

... (a)BSORBING OUTCOMES ...

"That is why we want to strip the Encounter of all its economic attributes. We have had enough of the Ape, Carnivorous the Bhaergala and the Ixitxachitl. Enough of the Encounter operating at the expense of all the tax-payers and aggravating the exhausted finances of the Party. Let there remain neh-thalggu, who protect gentlemen from the attacks of thieves and of delinquents; let there remain the Mastiff, Shadow whose baying brings fear of throttling; let there remain the Cave Cricket, which must guarantee the inviolability of the Underground, and let there remain the foreign policy." - Alberto Mumbles

Proof positive the bastards will keep on trying forever to strip out gold for XP while mook mining extends into infinity. 

Be that as it may, and regardless of the actions squad's posture, bettyandisabel come dancing from hop-scotch forthwith to find out if they are Ogre, Elf, or Dracolich. Predictably, as we drift further from the initial impulse, the ideas become a bit looser around the waist. Such is the fate of all amateur aeronauts (and is there any other kind?)

How did the dice drop do against Noisms' taxonomy this time, Ducky? Again, a full 100% (or rather, 0% miss rate), although since he doesn't engage with our animal brethren (bats, bears, beetles (giant), or birds), who can say.

BAATEZU
Eater	Bergfried The Hellsmouth as an overfilling bathtub. It needs a container or it will eat a hole in the floor like any other acid. Some clever soul has set up a performative devil cult overlayed onto the genuine infernal  caramel center, a kind of esoteric cosplay by imbeciles that frustrates the bedickens out of the baatezu intruder through icy vanilla 1980s heavy metal satanist-in-spandex mummery. For reference, see the oft quoted Terry Jones story, except in reverse - it's the baatezu who has given himself over too cheaply:  "Dr. Bonocolus' jaw dropped, and he went cold with horror . . . it wasn't the hideousness of the devil's features, nor even the cold brutality of that face that was worse than any torture to Dr. Bonocolus. It was the appalling realization, as he gazed into the devil's eyes, that the Devil was clearly stupid."
Houseguest	Biocatalysite An evil tree, evil sword, evil pack of swine. Bequeathed by a hermit or floating limb-nymph: the giver make a big deal about the object's providence, and what is to be done with it (confine, conquer, keep) but it's a phishing scam, and you can see the typos if you look closely: "Behold! The Sword of Power! Excilibar! Forged only moments after the Fal, when man still knew the language of cattle across the 1 thousand hills" He not busy being born is busy dying. Who not engage in both? The tree or the weapon is only to assist in your own personal carcinization.
Gollywhopper	Deepstructor Impossibly dense – the infernal equivalent of a black hole after the implosion of an archdevil into itself and its multitudinous schemes. One toe (or several) remains in the prime material (it's footprint in Baator is only a whirlpool anymore - a wasteland within the Wasteland). Even over here the D. Structur distorts gravity like the music video for U2 mysterious ways. It isn't intelligent - but operates with efficiency and ruthlessness until you open the door to hell a little wider and it falls back Home.

Stan Mack

BANSHEE
Eater	Chanter Attaches herself to armies, at first malicious, later spurring them sympathetically to reckless frenzy. It's the same insta-death if you fail your save – but the mechanics have been restructured – the afflicted rush blindly forward into the jaws of the enemy and are cut to ribbons. Her visage starts to show up on the heraldry because the army wins a lot despite or because of this behavior.
Nome	Balloonist The occasional pretty one. Her wail is a low whistle she can do it while speaking, although awkwardly and it creeps you out. Oftentimes marries a minor lord and slowly poisons everyone before floating off and being misidentified as a witch.
Houseguest	Drone Crone Pretty much what you think of when they say the B word – sentients cleared right out like somebody dropped a neutron bomb. You can set your watch to her tolling at midnight to keep the dead zone unpeopled. Nature gradually returns, however, as do the druids with cottonballs in their ears.

BASILISK
Eater	Ashlar-isk The hero did it all correct (mostly): employing a mirror and blindfold and echolocation. He got petrified anyway. 9/10 petrified. He is running away at a sprint molasses slow, shimmering like a like a wonderful cubist gemstone – don’t look at the wrong facet or you'll get caught in the wash following the lines back to the GAZE. You have no idea how common this really is. See, close doesn't cut it except for rabbits (quantity) and rhinoceroses (acicularity). The heroic types aren't really into fine details.  He's stone now (90%), but the fanciest kind. It takes a real master can make cuts (as, like with the fugu fish, a mistake is likely fatal) - only such fine stone is fit to stack a crown on. That idol's eyes on the PHB? Opus Isodumum.
Nome	Viviparisk A basilisk is born live from the fey mirror itself, hanging in the hallway, begging for you to self-exam. Don't eat their food, don't put on their mascara. It's addictive and cumulative, +1 Chr, +2 Chr, +2.5, better and better and better, wonderful hair and skin. Around +3, you abruptly switch places with a lizard, who, tongue flicking, crawls off to makes its bed of detritus and litter. The mirror stays there - the lizard admires itself at intervals, or admires you looking out at it, airbrushed perfect Supervan.
Houseguest	Astralisk What is the deal with the basilisk's gaze canonically extending to the ethereal and astral planes anyway?  The answer lies in the tri-partite nature of the soul. Per Plato, at they body's expiration, the soul persists and palingensesises its way onward to the next incarnation. A certain flavor of tyrant can't abide that – he doesn't want the wonderful systems he set up overthrown by some future or past or spectral version of himself. On his deathbead he wheezes, "Bring me the basilisk!" and they have one just for that purpose, to thumbtack his souls in place – the prime material’s logistikon, the astral’s thymoeides, the etherial’s epithymetikon. Certain strivers can't help but re-animate these god-kings by various means, to command their armies or revenge themselves on their opressors or generally cause mischief. When they un-petrify, however, maybe the other two bits (astral-ethereal) don’t, and you are left a dull doll boy, lizarding about.

Christopher Burdett

BAT
Eater	Charon-optera The bats that guard the gate to the land of the dead. They have skulls for faces, sometimes skeletal wings, and wear golden circlets. Souls try to sneak over all the time, but they catch them. If you interfere, for instance slaughtering the charon-optera for their treasure, souls a plenty will start to seep out.
Nome	Chiro-opera The highest form of art according to some scholars. You can make the bats dance after the bugs, and light them up by crushing phosphorescent crickets. The elfs will ask your opinion of the performance. Much like fairy food, it is best to politely decline having an opinion.
Gollywhopper	Heiro-optera At a scale you can’t even fathom and revealed only by analysis of certain blasphemous books. As the many multiverses zip around, generating light and heat and all that, even bigger bats flit around and catch them. Luckily space is BIG! Unluckily, at least per the formulae in archaic script, one of these is baring down on your cosmic address in a fortnight - what brave soul can be found to pilot a decoy in the other direction?

Museum of Jurassic Technologies

BEAR
Nome	Ursa Orrery It’s jet black with spots, and semi-incorporeal. People use them for telling the future or as spell components. When one appears, lots of folks are hot after it but it's clever and elusive.
Houseguest	Ursa Urtha Do you know that if you have the right bear (preferably skull white albino, potentially dirty with cave dirt and age) that you can bind a bunch of semi-hostile undead and they'll make their own little civilization. The higher level undead, the more persons it divides into. An apparation alone divides into dozens and dozens of nondescript citizens. Next, you shrink yourself down and live amongst them. Scrying magic is totally useless against one so camouflaged. Certain necromancers do that and drive the bear around like a battlestation.
Gollywhopper	Dislimmer Your basic North American brown bear, he’s a dislimber, he’ll chop you to pieces if you look at him crossways. This one does that, except it's claws cut the light. There’s a kind of dusky feeling where he’s been. The colors come back eventually, but not too fast.

Anastasia Stefurak

BEETLE, GIANT
Eater	Baleetlista Rhinoceros beetles engineered for total warfare. When launched (by goblinoids) they take wing straight into you. Then they wander back to the mechanism. Usually only a single shot is needed or even possible given that they don’t like each other, although elaborate twin-loaders use chutes and scent to mask the presence of rival beetles to each other.
Houseguest	Scarabageus Lady Pushing an ectoplasmic mass. The beetle is not interested in you – it needs the ectoplasm in which to lay its eggs. The ball, though, works something like a gelatinous cube – save vs death magic or 1d3 WIS damage per turn as you are incorporated.
Gollywhopper	Vault Beetle (Fichet-Xylotrupes) A bug of holding. Nearly impermeable – it’s blood hardens to steel at a breach – if you kill it, the pocket dimension will close off entirely. Some folks will install a dial and spindle lock. Again, the potential complication is if two any such meet – they will almost certainly fight and try to inject their contents into the other to paralyze the foe.

Hmmm. . . wrong kind of Beetles. Ah well.
robgibbo14

BEHIR
Eater	Bee-Eater All dragons avoid their territories, knowing one of these guys COULD potentially unhinge space and time swallow them whole (except for the Blue and Bronze whom for polarity reasons are immune - but how confident do they FEEL in that?)  It takes a long time to digest a dragon, the critter being by degrees larger and more dense than reality. A long, long time, and it swells the swallower up like it was stung by hornets. Poor puffy critter is left to drag its overstuffed body around using the frontmost talons and hiccup electric bubbles, rattling like an old car. You could power a city with that, and many are. These are managed by men padded suits, prodded and burped. It's not like you have to feed it.
Nome	Behir Now Pure cocaine psychosis. “Believe me, it was horrible, it wasn’t funny at all.” The opposite of a rust monster. Everything gets shinier and shiner until its nigh unusable. Your sword slips out of your fingers no matter how many hand exercises. Melancholy and doomed to watch innumerable material civilizations exhaust themselves according to the same pattern, grasp at straws and eventually make the behir king. You wouldn't want a dragon. But you're paranoid your worst antagonists will. The Behir's Solomonian "wisdom" is shortly renowned - but outside his excellency's immediacy, remains elusive.
Gollywhopper	Heaven-Piercing Behir Lagann A behir in a mech suit, complete with grappling hook tongue. To fight dragons, you must become a dragon. Every arm steers a different tiny mechanism, up to including awkward vulture wings that allow it to (clumsily) fly. Massive, yet fragile (any hit whatsoever will start to take out systems – it’s a puppet more than a super-robot), but inside is a behir anyway and he’ll have a go at engulfing you.

Alex Golden

BEHOLDER and BEHOLDER-KIN
Nome	Wilson You fight your way to the center of the conspiracy – past the elite guard to the big boss – the Occidental Oculator . . . and . . . it’s a just a rock. Badly painted. Barely painted. A rock. No magic aura. No nothin’. You’ve been grey-pilled, pilgrim. Save vs. Death Magic or in your disillusionment, any critter you don’t believe is there anymore. You can’t hit them (they being believed inanimate), but they certainly can you. Remove curse might reanimate things.
Houseguest	Phoropter Only two eyestalks, each attached to a panalopy of lenses, which the phoropter flicks in front of the central eye as he tries to get a read on you. If he gets you in focus (such short-lived creatures being blurry) he will zap you with a magic jar type spell, "URN" and trap you in a disc. Think Zod in the phantom zone.  The discs are quite valuable. Certain Underdim cities use them as large denominations of currency. Stay blurry, baby!
Gollywhopper	Noahic Revenant The ravages of latest Kali Yuga seems like maybe it has begun to recede, the frequency of particular set of avenging particulars dulled by crisp execution. Spheroid crime bosses fill the earth, carving out fiefdoms. Consider the crime octopus. Trade in the tentacles for eyestalks and you get the picture. The seven families send out a dove to see if there is dry land. The dove is a beholder of mediocre liniage, small for his age. He’s willing to deal for sure.

Kelly Green

BIRD
Eater	Gossipelican The bird is stupid as rocks (as Rocs?) but contains within its yawp a marvelous broth of 1d12 especially spicey rumors – perhaps not all pertinent to the immediate adventure, but each at the minimum partially true. Beware his kiss, he’ll swallow the things you know – shock them out your lips and snatches them out of the air like a cherry.
Nome	Bird Elemental I can’t tell you where the plane of birds lies. It flies South in Winter. Currently, it is somewhere between the Astral and Positive Material Plane methinks but might alight anywhere depending on the celestial cycle. A bird elemental will start small but aggregate – drawing whatever avians are nearby into its vaguely Ostrich shape.
Houseguest	Chicxulubird (The Devil’s Flea). There is a tree in hell. Similar to the field tree in the middle of a farm, it is by itself. It has birds. The look pretty much like birds. If you saw it, you’d think, what a brave thing, life is. Even as hell squeezes in, it persists. However, you’d be wrong. The tree and its birds are the defiler. Hell extends out from the tree. This was some sort of saurian utopia, now only ashes. Every once and a while an enterprising devil will try to eradicate the tree as a pest. It won’t work, not for long, but its inhabitants will scatter. A Chicxulubird may find its way to your tree. It will perch. It will call for its friends. Pray that the vast distance swallows the sound.

Stanley Mouse

BRAIN MOLE
Nome	Time Mole Between TA 2060 and TA 3021, brain moles routinely wiped archived memories due to lack of space, scarcity of cerebellar elasticity, and lack of rebroadcast rights. This is good practice. After all, what are psionics other than an aggregation of many previous lives, much like the discoloration of a dress shirt around the collar that hasn’t been properly laundered. And if everyone had psionics, it would be head explosions all the time. Better then, the mole. A time mole is attended by eager-eyed helpers, each lending the stupid thing their own inscrutable intelligence until it burns them out completely. They are collectively named Twēġen.
Houseguest	Mouldiwarp Long sought after as an aristocratic affectation, as the brain mole's population declined, a synthetic substitute was inevitable. An awful little skittering machine producing euphoria by scrubbing vestigial psionic residue clean. Euphoria being what it is, some people collect absolutely oodles of these, and their psyche’s are so eaten away they start to become psionic out of absence and will lash out unpleasantly at their neighbors. Sometimes a real brain mole will be the prize of the collection. But they are EXPENSIVE.
Gollywhopper	Scalopinaen Psalter The mole has disappeared entirely into an object, where, unencumbered by the constraints of clumsy oversoil and flesh, it’s network of tunnels can take on a more fully realized structure. Here then is one of those cursed objects, maybe with the pelt someway integrated - passed around and driving reader after reader insane. Positively radioactive. It will eat the world. Counter-programming by a rival mole similar miniaturized is the only antidote. The moles are nothing if not territorial.

Ron Deri

BROKEN ONE
Eater	Richard Stanley, I Presume The demiurge, utterly mad and dimensionally expelled at great cost in blood and treasure type F, has snuck back to this plane in the form of a badly fashioned dog man. This is an open secret. The rulers of the world know it. There’s talk of it in the tavern. The rumors table abounds with variations. It breeds total paranoia. The conspiracy that gets bigger and bigger in the telling – every time it pops up when info-gathering, more drastic measures follow. Advanced methods of detection are invented: electro-psychometers, voight-kampff tests, cephalometry. Everyone is at last a suspect.
Nome	Formerly a Magic Talking Fish You know the one. He will teach you magic known by nobody else, salvaged from the riverbank or the sedimentary deposit. The language of the small waters. Someone got to him. Ice-picked his brain. Now he’s all a mishmash of man and magic fish. He’ll fill out your spellbook, alright, but these spells cost more than they pay: “charm languages,” “hold magic,” “shieldtriloquism,” “continual radius,” “phantsmtchnics.” Stay well away.
Houseguest	Cathode Ray Mission A plague strikes. All the doc ocks in white hospital tents can do is add some spare parts against the withering of man. Pick an animal, re-roll the governing statistic. Get back to work.  1 – Ox – powerful – strong – but cumbrous (discard any armor) 2 – Lizard – clever, but lazy (need double recovery time for spells or hp) 3 – Owl – wise, but illiterate (operates on feels – magic users can function for a while on a gut feeling of what the words ought to say, but the spellbook starts crumble) 4 – Dog – agile, but obedient (and beware the R.S., I.P. situation if that really gets going) 5 – Boar – tough and bristly, but the smell! 6 – Frog – charming, but prone to bouts of singing.

Dani M F

BROWNIE
Nome	BRNE Vaccine Kind of like how you can stun a vampire by throwing out basmati rice and asking him to check your sums. If you keep a steady supply of Brownies, you can keep the hunter/killers at bay even as they surround you. It pays to keep the brownies in a drug-addled stupor though. Just dose the milk. DON’T WORRY – you are not sacrificing the poor critter to serated segmentation. Brownies are maddeningly hard to kill and what is a hunter/killer but a kind of home for the Brownie to inhabit after it wakes up a bit. It will make minor repairs in return.
Houseguest	GoFR Sometimes a Brownie takes up residence in a Calabi–Yau manifold or similar, solemnly intoning, "This is a farmhouse". The critter will spin itself golden, bake itself to a crisp, mend itself brand new, and keep the foxes out of itself. It will fill with holes and vibrate. Over time, it's more of a thin film anymore than a faerie, and will coat any object it touches like Roy Orbison in Cling Wrap. "Have you ever grooved heavily behind anything except love?"
Gollywhoppoer	Br0wn-3 Remember the hunter/killer which you recently appeased with a two-thirds sedated quarter-halfling? The Brownie took this one over completely, as well as the rest of the colony. He remains benign in temperament – on the other hand, the h/k is what it is. They frustrate each other. This just makes the h/ks all the more dangerous, and more enraged, the cheerful fools.

Andy Friedman

BUGBEAR
Eater	Bagbear A bit on the nose, isn’t it? The bag though. It is squirming something fierce. And the bagbear itself has a haunted look in its eyes like its being pursued by someone. It’s the bug-bag’s fault. It’s defective. The Bear puts lots of people in it. He’s compelled to by instinct. It jumbles them like a finely-blended scotch. Every time he pulls something out, though, for a bit of a snack, it's a giant sea star critter instead of a person. Then the wrestling begins. The compos-ite attempts to stuff the bagbear into its own bag and take its skin. You can demarcate them by version number iterated out from the original, or do a Mac OS style naming convention by mustalid suborder: 10 Helictinae etc. The eyes always change. It's like telling the age by the number of tree rings.
Nome	Scienterbear aka the “Polar” Bugbear. Everything you’ve ever been told is a lie. You told it to yourself. The scienterbear sells letter-coded capsules. They all do something alchemical to reality, shifting game you're playing. I do NOT recommend you take any pills from a Scienterbear. But people do. They seek them out for it. “You take the (B)lue pill – the story ends. You’re playing kiddie D&D now. Hope you weren’t a prestige class . . . You take the (G)reen pill – you stay in Oz, watch out for the monkeys - they are exceedingly large. You take the (S)afron pill, well, you’ve been poisoned, sorry. Here are 3 more pills: red, orange, and blue again. Take them in the correct order or your insides fill with rocks and you’ll be dead, no saving throw.”  Don’t call him “Santa Bear” or he will tear your arms off.
Gollywhopper	Boy Bears The RIGHT bears at the WRONG time. There were 6 of them to start. One became a Big Bad Villain. The others were duds. They want revenge. They want to be bigger than big. They want to be ENORMOUS.

John Randall York

BULETTE
Eater	Fonzie Jumps the Landshark “Thing is, you and me Red, you see we’re different, we’re doers! We’re doers!" It’s a running of the bulls kind of operation. Every year the youth expose themselves to a potential good old-fashioned mangling in the name of the Fertility Goddess. The festival has gone BIG though, and there are out-of- towners all over the place. I hope they know what they’re doing!
Nome	Bullit Like wolf riders, but much worse.  Two goblin hitmen are chasing a goblin detective. They are all riding bulettes, over whom they have only the most cursory control. There's a dead goblin somewhere who the hitmen already offed, a bone shaman. Suprise! it's not him at all – the shaman having TRANSFORMED into one of the bullettes (choose either Bullit's bullette or one belong to the hitmen) and dropped a lookalike on the ground all mauled to death.
Gollywhopper	The King's Ankus “‘Peace, now, thou fat monkey-killer! I have but to touch thy neck, and the Jungle will know thee no longer. Never Man came here that went away with the breath under his ribs. I am the Warden of the Treasure of the King’s City!’ ‘But, thou white worm of the dark, I tell thee there is neither king nor city! The Jungle is all about us!’"  - Kipling A cursed bullette goad brings ruin to all who wield it – and a good thing too, as it will call ALL the bullettes into a mating mash. It keeps changing hands, but as long as SOMEONE has it, the doom of bulettes keep rushing center.

BULLYWUG
Eater	Frogfight Over Guadacanal We all know that the Slaan are fallen aliens. So too the bullywug – and these are dropping off some sort of spaceship/fighter plane/mating ball they were hanging from/constituted the machinery of. (See also Nick Lund’sgoblin war giant, but less rigorously epoxied). After bemusedly observing the catastrophe, you realize there are several other frogships in pursuit of the first. It has a broken engine, spewing smoke. A rain of bullyugs are falling off, more every time it receives a good strafe.
Nome	Frogs for the Frog God Rough characters are conscripting frogs to sail interstellar. The frogs are hiding from them. Maybe you find a long wished-for suit of Field Plate +2 in the litter of a serpent and try it on. You don’t fit. There’s a frog inside. He puts his fingers to his lips. Shhhhhh.
Gollywhopper	Caecilians- à- cheval “I believe that the value of the frog and the opportunity for the frog in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the frog.” – Sir Douglas Fraig Frogs riding frogs (or maybe better, frogs riding frogs riding . . .) Internal attrition from campaign to campaign within the frog cavalry is unavoidable. The veterans get bigger and bigger from eating their neighbors and have to be reorganized into new divisions by seniority/size. They take pride of their patches and cavalry mustache.

Tooma