Thursday, August 21, 2025

... (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, but got petrified anyway. 9/10 petrified. He is fleeing now 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 is. See, close doesn't cut it except for rabbits (quantity) and rhinoceroses (acicularity), and the heroic types aren't really into 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. Don't eat their food, don't put on their mascara. It's addictive and cumulative, +1 Chr, +2 Chr, better and better and better, wonderful hair and skin, butly 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 does not likewise die, but palingensesises onward to the next incarnation. A certain flavor of tyrant can't abide that - he doesn't want the systems he set up overthrown by his nearest adversary, 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, for thumbtacking his soul 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.



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 currencyStay 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.


... (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 a...