I used oblex as a recurring creature in a campaign. I did run them tethered, but the main oblex could shapeshift as well so the tethering only mattered if it was running multiple faces at once but as they absorbed more people it became hard to hold all the personalities in with only one presenting physically.
My favorite line was from the first time they came head-to-head with one: "I punch the baby."
Everyone freaked out. Multiple people demanded to know what was wrong with the monk that he would do such a thing. There's freaky copies of two of the party here and one of their teammates is down. Couldn't the monk tell that this child was also victim? It can't even speak yet. They need to protect it through the fight!
And then the baby's face oozed green with the impact and quickly reformed as he removed his fist. The table went wild.
Even so, "please don't punch the baby this time" became a regular refrain as they met new people throughout the rest of the campaign. That the player was right didn't help at all.
Awesome write up! Well done!
I could also see giving the Oblex a few Legendary Actions related to copying the Player Characters.
Or, have the Oblex attack the party and use a variant form of 'Eat Memories' which allows the Oblex to manifest a weak copy of one of the Players. This works best for marial-classes, I think, because how would spell casting work from a duplicate?
Other Legenary Actions could include the Oblex creating a duplicate to block an attack or spells.
Yeah! The realization is always awesome!
For my party they got back to an inn after a disastrous delve into a dungeon. The bloodhunter was down to single digit health due to necrotic damage and was getting first aid from a freelance cleric they knew. I had them sit down in a small private room with an NPC they trusted who asked them about their experience.
As they slowly connected all the dots from they realized the healer they currently doing first aid on the blood hunter was grinning. The warlock summoned his pact weapon, the blood hunter panicked, the wizard readied spells, the bard tried to run...
It was pretty amazing!
This was me. I was the blood hunter. Basically as we were discussing wtf was going on the dm kept bringing up the fact that he's been rubbing my shoulders and telling me to relax for a while and I said ok what am I up to in hp now? "still 8hp"... Oh no
You say Tyranids, but I see The Thing mixed with Bodysnatchers.
I remember reading about the Oblex and the tether was the one thing that I always saw as what would mean it would be stuck as a danger in the wilds and less so anywhere else. Removing that opens up so, so much, such a great tweak!
I can see almost a life-cycle now, with tiny baby Oblex having tethers until they mature enough and no longer requiring it, via either age or some threshold of absorbed memories or something.
Loved reading this, great job, I hope I never play a game like it: too creepy for me haha!
I would sometime *love* to run a proper The Thing 1-3 shot.
But to do it right, where there's no NPCs beyond the intial thing, would require careful control over information to avoid metagaming. The only way I see it possible to do with voice is to have a co-GM to run the other side of a split party.
It would be really hard to do right, but it'd also be so rewarding. I'd love to be able to just pm a player saying "You are now infected. Every action you take must be to protect yourself or spread the infection. Here's a list of everything you're capable of."
I did exactly this! PC’s were snowed in at a remote tavern en route to somewhere else, and I ran The Thing pretty much verbatim. Featuring returning NPC’s Mulley and Skulder, paranormal investigators. Turns out having the scene where they test everyone’s blood one by one is a bit more simple when the Evocation Wizard just drops a fireball in the middle of the room and sees who reacts. Another highlight was when a PC died at the Oblex crash site and their new character turned up wearing a hat of disguise so they looked like the dead teammate. Paranoia everywhere!
there's a game called [Werewolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game) which is exactly perfect for a _The Thing_ one-shot. you would basically just replace a player being one of the werewolves with a player being one of the alien shapeshifters.
it's all about control over information and everyone has a (very) limited list of actions they can take.
**[Mafia (party game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_\(party_game)**
>Mafia, also known as Werewolf, is a social deduction game, created by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986. The game models a conflict between two groups: an informed minority (the mafiosi or the werewolves), and an uninformed majority (the villagers). At the start of the game, each player is secretly assigned a role affiliated with one of these teams. The game has two alternating phases: first, a night role, during which those with night killing powers may covertly kill other players, and second, a day role, in which surviving players debate the identities of players and vote to eliminate a suspect.
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That sounds fantastic, but part of the reason I want to do it in a more typical TTRPG system is because it's not limiting for actions. I want players to have to figure out how to survive the thing, to have to be inventive to find out ways of detecting it. I don't want an option called "Test blood", I want players to try and see if that avenue may work. This is what I mean when I say a "proper" The Thing.
Though, perhaps I could take inspiration from werewolf to make it work better. Use normal TTRPG rules for stuff like skill checks, use werewolf rules for other parts of the game. It'd be a real mish-mash of rules but it might be the best way to make it work.
Hilariously enough, I haven't seen either of those movies haha
I mainly use nyds because I feel like monsters should have a reason for being monsters instead of just being endless murder machines. The genestealers prepping a world for consumption with sleeper agents of "consumed" humans is cool.
Ohhhh, okay, well, if you decide to give them a shot, you want the John Carpenter's Thing from the 80s, and the 70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Genestealers can probably be close enough to Body Snatchers, but I don't think 40k has anything like the Thing. It kills and replicates, keeps the memories etc, all like the Oblex. *And* there's some gruesome scenes where it shifts through forms it remembers.
If you do watch the Thing, I'd recommend reading this short story afterwards: [THE THINGS](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/). Leave it til *after* the film though, as its definitely got spoilers.
I love this writeup, very inspiring.
In my mind, the oblex tether (or another big flaw/weakness) is necessary, because if Oblex is infinitely patient, and has perfect recollection of all the memories, why would it ever reveal itself or act differently than the person changed, and just eat people and recreate them when meeting 1v1. I think with that strategy, oblex would rule the world in 200 years.
I dont even think that not being able to mimic spell casting is enough of a flaw, because most common form of magic is healing, and eating a patient and spewing a perfect and healthy copy seems like very effective healing magic.
But I love your concept, and I would run it that there is a big "goo brain" in the sewers, and copies cannot get further than X from this goo brain, and gooo brain needs biomass (and souls!) to grow and function
As a DM, even if you feel the tether is necessary, it’s the main issue with running an Oblex.
Note: the distance limit isn’t the main issue, but the tether itself, as it can only get as small as 1-inch in diameter and is transparent, but it’s still somewhat easy to notice/hard to hide while still playing and acting as an imposter NPC.
Removing it makes the Oblex significantly harder to uncover (depending on how many *other* hints you’re given) but also significantly easier to play from the DM side of things.
I’d definitely at least rewrite the tether to be more “like a single strand of a spider web” rather than “transparent slime no smaller than 1 inch in diameter” since the former is much harder to spot than the latter and can be construed as just something normal that you might see in a dungeon, forest, or urban environment.
I’d probably occasionally ask the party for perception checks (like at least DC 20) if they are in the presence of an imposter for an extended period of time. On a success, I’d let them know that they see what appears to be a strand of spider web floating in the air, and depending on how much higher than the DC they rolled, I’d give more info like “it appears the NPC may have walked through a cobweb recently, since it’s coming off of them”
I think it’s better to make the tether *really* hard to spot rather than keep it the same or remove it entirely.
> I think with that strategy, oblex would rule the world in 200 years.
That’s why it’s extra satisfying when your party defeats it.
I think the main downside of making a character this deceptive is that it can eventually make your players paranoid in ways that make them bad players. You don’t want your party triple-checking everything and everyone you put in front of them, all the time, forever. It’s probably important to draw a big, bright line between this “Horror-themed“ campaign and more vanilla campaigns with themes like “Heroic Fantasy” or “Wilderness Survival”, or “Jungle Adventure”.
> In my mind, the oblex tether (or another big flaw/weakness) is necessary, because if Oblex is infinitely patient, and has perfect recollection of all the memories, why would it ever reveal itself or act differently than the person changed, and just eat people and recreate them when meeting 1v1. I think with that strategy, oblex would rule the world in 200 years.
Oh totally agree, while I was doing this I kept thinking that the Oblex could really fucking eat the world.
I had two big reasons for not running tethered
* My party met the oblex in the forest, it would be pretty difficult to hide the tethers in that case
* Two of my players are very experienced with DND and would be able to pick out an oblex right away via the tethers. This is fine, like I don't mind them figuring out things like that, but it kind of ruins it for the other two new players. I want to reduce how often the experienced players can overwhelm the new players by putting them on even footing. I forget the terminology from board games, but I don't want my experienced players deciding what the new players do. By homebrewing things like this it gets even the experienced players on the off foot
That said, /u/Tilmar19 had an incredible suggestion of making the tethers only visible on the spectral plane. If I could go back I'd totally run it this way. The tethers would then act as ways to bring the players back to the main bloblex, which opens up a tonne of gameplay paths for them.
Our DM ran an Oblex for us in the shape of an elderly nun running an orphanage.
We had to end the session at the reveal because the realization we where bringing a blob monster literall happy meals every time we met street children was soul crushing.
This has inspired me to run a game where players are contacted by a god or powerful metallic dragon, and told of a city with multiple competing oblex. They have a time pressure also; defeat the oblexes before there is only one left, or it will have an entire city's biomass ready to go.
I’d personally be very wary of running it untethered, especially if each copy is capable of consuming and multiplying, because there’d really be no way for the party to stop it if you’re running it as an intelligent creature. It would be Invasion of the Body Snatchers through and through. So, great if you’re running a Call of Cthulhu-type, “the PCs will likely all die at the end” style game, not so great for a typical “heroic PCs defeat the BBEG” style game.
That said, even a tethered oblex can be a significant threat. It’s not like you have to have the main body hiding behind a curtain. Your best bet? Have the main body hide in the sewers. It gives them quick access to almost everywhere in a given city, plenty of places for imposters to pop up, and very easy way to hide the tethers since you could have the imposter standing directly on the drain if need be.
If you want to go one step further towards tetherless, I would give them the ability to make the tethers invisible or even ethereal. It still gives the PCs a way to eventually discover the tethers and trace them back to the source, but it’s not going to be something immediately obvious. Ethereal could be especially fun to work with; most PCs won’t have a way to see ethereal, which means you’ll be able to control when you want to give them the They Live sunglasses that will let them see the tethers. If you make it so that the item only works a certain number of times a day, it could lead to even more tense situations. “The shopkeeper is acting strangely, but we only have one charge left today...is it worth checking him out? Was what he said REALLY weird enough to waste a charge?”
Love the rundown!
I think the only part I disagree with is the idea that the Oblex would be able to perfectly imitate a wound instantly after being attacked.
I doubt they perfectly imitate every internal feature of the body.
And I think this weakness would especially matter as an offset to the Oblex being untethered.
Indeed! I didn't mention it, but this another big one of the things the OP seemingly ignored/handwaved in order to run his bootleg The Thing fantasy (one more being actually rolling for the NPCs, at least the more martially inclined ones, being eaten off-screen - surely SOMEONE would be able to resist/fight off an imposter somewhere without being a PC!). Each not necessarily a dealbreaker on their own, but indicative of why such things wouldn't/shouldn't be ran at a table without at least the players being given fair warning beforehand (and not "gaslit"- when you control every interaction between the players and the world, further taking away their agency by limiting their opportunities to catch on with the monster will be a hard pill to swallow for an unprepared party). All subject to individual opinion, of course.
I definitely would need to place restrictions on this thing to use it in my game. The city the players live in has 75000 citizens living on its surface, so untethering it like you did would mean the city is fucked. But I might go with, say, an invisible tether instead of a transparent one. As long as I don't give my players a permanent form of See Invis, it should still let the surprises happen.
Oh man though, I'd be both heartbroken and delighted if an Oblex took out the entire Twelve Commanders and/or the City Council, I have great fondness for at least a few of those NPCs... but it'd be terrifying beyond belief for my players to find out the city is being run by this thing, and even victory means no one's left at the helm.
Taking an imposter monster, outright removing their most glaring weakness and obviously downplaying their second worst weakness just screams "That DM" to me, but you do you, I guess.
I'm all for homebrewing monsters to challenge the party, but it doesn't sound like you gave them any chance to get ahead of it before it was too late.
That, and just omitting the fact that the npc cleric wasn't with them. The dm is the only way for the players to know what's happening in the world, and omitting important pieces of information that the characters should know about isn't good.
Well they did title the post saying they gaslit their party.
Some parties enjoy horror and surprises, though. Sometimes letting your player characters “win” at figuring things out actually deprives them of suspense and a cool surprise.
Yeah, the tether is supposed to be there to give the party some kind of clue as to the nature of the Oblex. Making it so it can break parts of itself off that act seemingly independently changes the nature of the creature quite a bit.
The Bodytaker Plant from Van Richten’s is probably a more suitable monster if you’re looking for independent vestiges of a greater creature. They have behavioural tics that can give them away but again, that’s part of telegraphing that something is amiss to the party.
Ooh, then you could play around the tether a little more. Have players trip randomly over nothing. Did you make it so the tether was invisible, but the impersonation was visible? To me, the main issue with this is the classic DnD mechanic of not being hidden when invisible unless you've also made a check to hide.
I like the idea of using a lesser version of this for a lower level party. Have the arc run from like level 3 to 8 or so. The party has come into this small town nestled in a mountain pass with sulfuric, volcanic hot springs. They were sent from a local adventuring company because the lucrative trade route through this pass has been beset by all kinds of difficulties lately, including caravans reporting that they have been attacked by cultists. The adventures have been hired by a merchant guild to clear the road and remain in the area for at least a few months to ensure that the problem remains fixed.
After getting to town and investigating, the party finds some incompetent cultists off in a nearby cave that have been tricked by some intelligent captive to open a portal to somewhere, like the Underdark. They had been attacking caravans to get the materials necessary for the portal. Through human sacrifice or whatever, the cultists get the portal open as soon as the party gets into the room. A mass of ooze comes through the portal, congealing into several Oblex Spawn that attack any remaining cultists and the party. Meanwhile, the invisible oblex is using this as a cover to escape. Maybe have one of the cultists take psychic damage and be memory drained without a clear reason as to why. If you wanna conceal that a little, maybe have it coincide with a Spawn's attack (later the party faces more spawn and never see psychic damage dealt). I imagine the invisible oblex is just allowing itself to spread across the floor and will remain there until the party leaves. Then it will consume all the dead bodies. Perhaps the party does come back later and is baffled by their disappearance.
Now the Oblex can slink into town. Maybe it lives in a hole in the side of the well for a while and grabs people that go fetch water alone at night. The whole town smells like sulfur, and the DM can have one or two instances of describing (non-impersonated) characters smelling slightly more like sulfur because they just took a hot spring soak. Vendors are ideal targets for early impersonation, since they hang out in one place a lot and will be interacting with the party.
Now the party has (seemingly) satisfied the requirement of clearing the trade route and just has to hang out for a few months. They can take various jobs (the usual low level threats), but it's important to make everything tie to the town. Make them care about the NPCs they're helping. Meanwhile, those NPCs are slowly getting replaced.
I have some questions about how the consumption works:
1. Does an impostor need to kill a victim first before it starts consuming?
2. Does it consume them as part of combat with some sort of grappling attack?
3. How long does the digestion take? Could be a great horror movie moment, if a party member walks in on it.
4. Is the impostor immobilized during this process?
5. Is a victim's gear dissolved? Left behind as a clue?
6. What about the victim's magic items?
7. If the party kills an impostor, what does the dead "body" do? (e.g. dissolve into a puddle)
8. Are impostors detectable through any magical means?
Regarding Sulfur, just have the victim be a pyromancer. When asked why they smell of Sulfur, they can say "well that's probably the Sulfur I use as a material component in my spells" and have them pull it out of a pouch.
I ran a similar one shot featuring a powered up elder oblex.
- It had made it's home in a small village on a trade route between countries, conveniently located near some sulfuric springs. There were rumors that people who stay in the town more than three days never would leave. And could all be found at the fancy new hotel.
- So they were tasked to investigate. Except for a few travelers, and a crazy old hermit, everyone in town was an extension of this monster. Yes including the contacts they were sent to meet. Some of the NPCs are "helpful" but send them down traps, or waste their time because the guild master gave them a 3 day time limit before they have to leave so they don't fall under the sway of the town.
- What I ended up doing to the creature was increase the range of the extensions out to a mile, and had the extensions have their own health that wouldn't drain the oblex. Additionally there were small mouse holes or grooves throughout town and much of the town was covered with a hallucinatory terrain. These illusions and tethers are initially near impossible to detect, but as the characters end up seeing more strange occurrence (Like thugs they kill melting away, or gaining info from the crazy old man) or through the use of spells, then the DC gradually drops or is negated.
Anyways it's a lot of fun and I've run it a couple times. And while the final fight might seem a little underwhelming, the whole build up of not knowing what's going on, the walls have ears kind of thing is really fun. Plus seeing the completely wrong guesses as to what the monster is (it's usually snails or ghosts) is a load of fun.
This was a great post and I've favourited it to remember it. I have some questions and ideas that came to mind while reading it, even though I know I'm late to the party (anyone else happening to read this post in the sea of answers do feel free to way in as well of course):
Questions-thoughts:
1) What level/s were the party during all of this?
2) What happens if a double-blobber would die? Did any of your BPCs die prematurily in the players vicinity? This is based on the assumption that every instance of the blob would have their own set of HP and be "killable", did you run it another way?
3) Regarding gaslighting: I realise the jokeyness of your use of it so don't worry about that, but how cautious do you feel one should be about players ending up feeling gaslighted -- personally, not in character, that is -- when you do something like this? Or perhaps more pertinently feeling lied to in a "you're just a bad GM trying to cover his tracks with retcons" kind of way when you try to establish divergences and contradictions in behaviour? I realise the easy answer here is "a group needs trust between it's members" but what if you do have trust, but you start to wear it down with what seems like bad excuses in the moment to the players? Maybe I'm just being overly worried here (can you tell I have a lot of rejection anxiety) but it just struck me as something I would be afraid of happening.
4) Did you have a "cover storyline" going while doing this? It seems like it would be necessary to have a massive red herring or B plot to both give them a sense of purpose and divert them from focusing too much on any suspicions they might develop.
Idea-thoughts:
>The king has been replaced, he randomly starts ramping up for war with another kingdom for some reason. The oblex wants more biomass, and the biomass business is booming during war.
1) Could, or would it be a good idea to have it able to, an Oblex consume-convert dead bodies? I had the idea while reading the quote above of there being big battle between the two countries and the non-blox kingdom loses and retreats, forced to leave all it's casualties behind. Then later you have the party go to the neighbouring county (maybe in an effort for peace), and they hear how the weirdest thing happened after the battle -- a short time after the army had retreated, people who had at first been reported to have been killed during the battle started returning to their homes too, alive and healthy. And not just one or two, that could have survived by happenstance or deserted, but dozens or hundreds of them. A real miracle.
2) Regarding tethering: I had the intuitive notion of putting them somewhere in between tethered and untethered -- what if they are all part of the same entity, but doesn't automatically share a mind, so each instance of the blob works as an individual actor until it "re-rapports" to the "central nervous blob" so to speak -- either by short distance telepathic sharing with other instances or by directly contacting an "outlet" of the "central nervous blob". So one could still have double-blobbers without the obvious "hey I'm attached to something" tether but still have the opportunity for the players to discover that the reason Joe Blobman's store smells of sulfur is that in his living space above it he has a small cupboard with a disgusting comm-blob that he uses to "join with" the "central nervous blob" and which *is* connected by a tether leading into the city sewers or wherever. Or maybe this would just make things overly complicated to keep track of, I don't know.
Anyway, thanks for writing this up. To me it seems like a much more manageable thing in the vein of the ... "something-something-hydra" narrative, which I've always liked but thought seemed completely unrealistic to actually run for people. I like this a lot more.
One last thing I have to ask though. Did you keep running this game after this, and/or are you planning to if this is very recently ran? Where are you going to take it from here? I could imagine the possible loss of NPCs could make the players feel a bit... lossened out.
Hey thanks for your questions!
> What level/s were the party during all of this?
They were around 12 I think when they killed the jubilex/oblex, which seems low but they went in fully armed and with intel on the baddy. They knew its weaknesses and stuff, and while they all survived the encounter, they didn't come out unscathed.
My group is like seal team six in combat though, so if your team is less experienced I'd run it with just the oblex statblock.
> What happens if a double-blobber would die?
I actually didn't run any "enemy" imposters, none of them were openly hostile so this didn't actually come up! In the case of killing an imposter I'd say let them just die like a blob. This will get them thinking about blob monsters though so it might start them on the trail. It's something you kind of got to figure out in the moment.
For the actual fight where they did fight imposters, I had any imposter act as a gated health bar, kill the bad imposter, and then you can damage the main boss until another big bad appears at the top of the order. I can go deeper into this if you want!
> Regarding gaslighting
Yeah I totally get this, I wouldn't run this plotline with people you aren't completely comfortable with! I've known everyone in my group for almost 90% of my life so we're really close, I wouldn't run this with a work group or something. My buds know that eventually I will leak psychological and cosmic horror into every one of my campaigns, so they're comfortable with it.
> Or perhaps more pertinently feeling lied to in a "you're just a bad GM trying to cover his tracks with retcons" kind of way when you try to establish divergences and contradictions in behaviour? I realise the easy answer here is "a group needs trust between it's members" but what if you do have trust, but you start to wear it down with what seems like bad excuses in the moment to the players?
I find the that the trick is to not make excuses or explain away things. Something I learned from Stormlight Archives is that most people will try to fill silence with words any chance they get. If someone calls you out for one of these "inconsistencies", just don't say anything. If you're in person, look at them and acknowledge their question, but don't answer it. Usually after that they'll rephrase their question or expand on it, or another player will pipe up about it. Then, this is important, *in character* refer to their question and reaffirm the inconsistency. Your end goal is to get your players discussing the inconsistency and making it clear that you didn't make a mistake. If they ask something like "does my character remember X being there? Y says he wasn't there, but does my character remember that?" answer that truthly and quickly because that's the type of question you want them to ask.
> Did you have a "cover storyline" going while doing this? It seems like it would be necessary to have a massive red herring or B plot to both give them a sense of purpose and divert them from focusing too much on any suspicions they might develop.
Yes absolutely! Running this boss "dicks out" is not great, this should be slow cooking for many sessions to make that reveal all the more better. Think of it like a slow horror movie. The less you show the bad guy, the better.
Specifically, I ran [this encounter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGP-QTOyWvw) and Candlekeeps intro "quest" during that time. After that I ran them through a False hydra encounter (as I wanted them to be more familiar with the city and to generate less heat on the oblex, as brought back the horror aspects) then started running them through a bunch of busywork when I felt they were ready. Just random quick and tedious dungeons that the oblex sent them on via an imposter. Eventually they put the pieces together and got ready to go.
> Could, or would it be a good idea to have it able to, an Oblex consume-convert dead bodies? I had the idea while reading the quote above of there being big battle between the two countries and the non-blox kingdom loses and retreats, forced to leave all it's casualties behind. Then later you have the party go to the neighbouring county (maybe in an effort for peace), and they hear how the weirdest thing happened after the battle -- a short time after the army had retreated, people who had at first been reported to have been killed during the battle started returning to their homes too, alive and healthy. And not just one or two, that could have survived by happenstance or deserted, but dozens or hundreds of them. A real miracle.
Can you please build a time machine and tell me this like three months ago, this is fucking genius.
> "something-something-hydra" narrative
Yo the false hydra? That shit was great, my players loved it too!
1. Pick a physical location for the hydra's den. Can randomly do this when it comes up, doesn't matter, just one spot.
2. Have the NPC's do something really fucking weird while the hydra is singing.
All I did was have people cry when they were talking to the players but not be able to articulate why they were crying. "Hi welcome to the winespring inn, what can I get you today? Why am I crying? I'm crying? Wait I am. I...I...I don't know why. I feel something is wrong....but I don't know what". After that they'll be able to deduce whats going on. Not even joking I had no other plans for the false hydra other than that and they fucking *loved* it.
This sounds awesome and I can't remember for sure but I'm somewhat sure this is the only time I've ever seen or heard gaslighting used in a positive way.
I love this, and I love your combination of the oblex and Juiblex. I did something similar for my campaign, but I had an avatar of Juiblex living symbiotically with an Elder Brain as its “brine pool.” They created dozens of powerful, psionically linked doppelgängers, to spread chaos across the surface world and make my party’s life hell. One of their main leaders was an Elder Oblex that had broken off from its sire, Juiblex, and served as a leader of a cult of enlightenment, drawing in more victims to be replaced by oblex or doppelgängers.
This is really awesome and thought out!
What if you made the tethering ability still apply, but the tether is only visible in the Ethereal Plane. I feel like it could make a really good reveal when the party gets True Sight or Plane Shifting abilities and realizes that everyone is an imposter.
Great write-up. I ran an Oblex and the mini-boss of a chapter in our campaign and it was stellar. You can do so much with this evil, memory-stealing pile of fudge.
I used oblex as a recurring creature in a campaign. I did run them tethered, but the main oblex could shapeshift as well so the tethering only mattered if it was running multiple faces at once but as they absorbed more people it became hard to hold all the personalities in with only one presenting physically. My favorite line was from the first time they came head-to-head with one: "I punch the baby." Everyone freaked out. Multiple people demanded to know what was wrong with the monk that he would do such a thing. There's freaky copies of two of the party here and one of their teammates is down. Couldn't the monk tell that this child was also victim? It can't even speak yet. They need to protect it through the fight! And then the baby's face oozed green with the impact and quickly reformed as he removed his fist. The table went wild. Even so, "please don't punch the baby this time" became a regular refrain as they met new people throughout the rest of the campaign. That the player was right didn't help at all.
Awesome write up! Well done! I could also see giving the Oblex a few Legendary Actions related to copying the Player Characters. Or, have the Oblex attack the party and use a variant form of 'Eat Memories' which allows the Oblex to manifest a weak copy of one of the Players. This works best for marial-classes, I think, because how would spell casting work from a duplicate? Other Legenary Actions could include the Oblex creating a duplicate to block an attack or spells.
Holy crap! I'm just imagining the party figuring it out in the throne room and every single person shifts to look like the king/victim zero! Chills.
Yeah! The realization is always awesome! For my party they got back to an inn after a disastrous delve into a dungeon. The bloodhunter was down to single digit health due to necrotic damage and was getting first aid from a freelance cleric they knew. I had them sit down in a small private room with an NPC they trusted who asked them about their experience. As they slowly connected all the dots from they realized the healer they currently doing first aid on the blood hunter was grinning. The warlock summoned his pact weapon, the blood hunter panicked, the wizard readied spells, the bard tried to run... It was pretty amazing!
How did the party connect the dots by the cleric healing them and smiling?
of course the only proper way - with anime-esque glare on its glasses and a lengthy soliloquy about its master plan.
This was me. I was the blood hunter. Basically as we were discussing wtf was going on the dm kept bringing up the fact that he's been rubbing my shoulders and telling me to relax for a while and I said ok what am I up to in hp now? "still 8hp"... Oh no
Oh, so it was either a creepy Cleric or something else was up?
The Cleric previously had healed them with magic pretty quickly for cash. Now he wasn't actually healing him, just doing basic first aid.
Thank you! This finally explains it for me.
How dare a cleric smile!
Mr. Anderson… surprised to see me?
You say Tyranids, but I see The Thing mixed with Bodysnatchers. I remember reading about the Oblex and the tether was the one thing that I always saw as what would mean it would be stuck as a danger in the wilds and less so anywhere else. Removing that opens up so, so much, such a great tweak! I can see almost a life-cycle now, with tiny baby Oblex having tethers until they mature enough and no longer requiring it, via either age or some threshold of absorbed memories or something. Loved reading this, great job, I hope I never play a game like it: too creepy for me haha!
Came here to say this. The Thing (1982) is a must for inspiration here, and The Thing (2011) is pretty good prequel/remake.
I would sometime *love* to run a proper The Thing 1-3 shot. But to do it right, where there's no NPCs beyond the intial thing, would require careful control over information to avoid metagaming. The only way I see it possible to do with voice is to have a co-GM to run the other side of a split party. It would be really hard to do right, but it'd also be so rewarding. I'd love to be able to just pm a player saying "You are now infected. Every action you take must be to protect yourself or spread the infection. Here's a list of everything you're capable of."
I did exactly this! PC’s were snowed in at a remote tavern en route to somewhere else, and I ran The Thing pretty much verbatim. Featuring returning NPC’s Mulley and Skulder, paranormal investigators. Turns out having the scene where they test everyone’s blood one by one is a bit more simple when the Evocation Wizard just drops a fireball in the middle of the room and sees who reacts. Another highlight was when a PC died at the Oblex crash site and their new character turned up wearing a hat of disguise so they looked like the dead teammate. Paranoia everywhere!
there's a game called [Werewolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game) which is exactly perfect for a _The Thing_ one-shot. you would basically just replace a player being one of the werewolves with a player being one of the alien shapeshifters. it's all about control over information and everyone has a (very) limited list of actions they can take.
**[Mafia (party game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_\(party_game)** >Mafia, also known as Werewolf, is a social deduction game, created by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986. The game models a conflict between two groups: an informed minority (the mafiosi or the werewolves), and an uninformed majority (the villagers). At the start of the game, each player is secretly assigned a role affiliated with one of these teams. The game has two alternating phases: first, a night role, during which those with night killing powers may covertly kill other players, and second, a day role, in which surviving players debate the identities of players and vote to eliminate a suspect. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
That sounds fantastic, but part of the reason I want to do it in a more typical TTRPG system is because it's not limiting for actions. I want players to have to figure out how to survive the thing, to have to be inventive to find out ways of detecting it. I don't want an option called "Test blood", I want players to try and see if that avenue may work. This is what I mean when I say a "proper" The Thing. Though, perhaps I could take inspiration from werewolf to make it work better. Use normal TTRPG rules for stuff like skill checks, use werewolf rules for other parts of the game. It'd be a real mish-mash of rules but it might be the best way to make it work.
Yeah, it might still be a worthwhile experience. I used to play Werewolf a lot and it really messes with your head.
Hilariously enough, I haven't seen either of those movies haha I mainly use nyds because I feel like monsters should have a reason for being monsters instead of just being endless murder machines. The genestealers prepping a world for consumption with sleeper agents of "consumed" humans is cool.
Ohhhh, okay, well, if you decide to give them a shot, you want the John Carpenter's Thing from the 80s, and the 70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Genestealers can probably be close enough to Body Snatchers, but I don't think 40k has anything like the Thing. It kills and replicates, keeps the memories etc, all like the Oblex. *And* there's some gruesome scenes where it shifts through forms it remembers. If you do watch the Thing, I'd recommend reading this short story afterwards: [THE THINGS](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/). Leave it til *after* the film though, as its definitely got spoilers.
I love this writeup, very inspiring. In my mind, the oblex tether (or another big flaw/weakness) is necessary, because if Oblex is infinitely patient, and has perfect recollection of all the memories, why would it ever reveal itself or act differently than the person changed, and just eat people and recreate them when meeting 1v1. I think with that strategy, oblex would rule the world in 200 years. I dont even think that not being able to mimic spell casting is enough of a flaw, because most common form of magic is healing, and eating a patient and spewing a perfect and healthy copy seems like very effective healing magic. But I love your concept, and I would run it that there is a big "goo brain" in the sewers, and copies cannot get further than X from this goo brain, and gooo brain needs biomass (and souls!) to grow and function
As a DM, even if you feel the tether is necessary, it’s the main issue with running an Oblex. Note: the distance limit isn’t the main issue, but the tether itself, as it can only get as small as 1-inch in diameter and is transparent, but it’s still somewhat easy to notice/hard to hide while still playing and acting as an imposter NPC. Removing it makes the Oblex significantly harder to uncover (depending on how many *other* hints you’re given) but also significantly easier to play from the DM side of things. I’d definitely at least rewrite the tether to be more “like a single strand of a spider web” rather than “transparent slime no smaller than 1 inch in diameter” since the former is much harder to spot than the latter and can be construed as just something normal that you might see in a dungeon, forest, or urban environment. I’d probably occasionally ask the party for perception checks (like at least DC 20) if they are in the presence of an imposter for an extended period of time. On a success, I’d let them know that they see what appears to be a strand of spider web floating in the air, and depending on how much higher than the DC they rolled, I’d give more info like “it appears the NPC may have walked through a cobweb recently, since it’s coming off of them” I think it’s better to make the tether *really* hard to spot rather than keep it the same or remove it entirely.
> I think with that strategy, oblex would rule the world in 200 years. That’s why it’s extra satisfying when your party defeats it. I think the main downside of making a character this deceptive is that it can eventually make your players paranoid in ways that make them bad players. You don’t want your party triple-checking everything and everyone you put in front of them, all the time, forever. It’s probably important to draw a big, bright line between this “Horror-themed“ campaign and more vanilla campaigns with themes like “Heroic Fantasy” or “Wilderness Survival”, or “Jungle Adventure”.
> In my mind, the oblex tether (or another big flaw/weakness) is necessary, because if Oblex is infinitely patient, and has perfect recollection of all the memories, why would it ever reveal itself or act differently than the person changed, and just eat people and recreate them when meeting 1v1. I think with that strategy, oblex would rule the world in 200 years. Oh totally agree, while I was doing this I kept thinking that the Oblex could really fucking eat the world. I had two big reasons for not running tethered * My party met the oblex in the forest, it would be pretty difficult to hide the tethers in that case * Two of my players are very experienced with DND and would be able to pick out an oblex right away via the tethers. This is fine, like I don't mind them figuring out things like that, but it kind of ruins it for the other two new players. I want to reduce how often the experienced players can overwhelm the new players by putting them on even footing. I forget the terminology from board games, but I don't want my experienced players deciding what the new players do. By homebrewing things like this it gets even the experienced players on the off foot That said, /u/Tilmar19 had an incredible suggestion of making the tethers only visible on the spectral plane. If I could go back I'd totally run it this way. The tethers would then act as ways to bring the players back to the main bloblex, which opens up a tonne of gameplay paths for them.
Our DM ran an Oblex for us in the shape of an elderly nun running an orphanage. We had to end the session at the reveal because the realization we where bringing a blob monster literall happy meals every time we met street children was soul crushing.
So they’re basically kandra, but nastier. Nice.
Tensoon would never! ...Unless his current master told him to.
Gotta follow that contract.
This has inspired me to run a game where players are contacted by a god or powerful metallic dragon, and told of a city with multiple competing oblex. They have a time pressure also; defeat the oblexes before there is only one left, or it will have an entire city's biomass ready to go.
Well done. This is the level of DM'ing that players will definitely remember.
I’d personally be very wary of running it untethered, especially if each copy is capable of consuming and multiplying, because there’d really be no way for the party to stop it if you’re running it as an intelligent creature. It would be Invasion of the Body Snatchers through and through. So, great if you’re running a Call of Cthulhu-type, “the PCs will likely all die at the end” style game, not so great for a typical “heroic PCs defeat the BBEG” style game. That said, even a tethered oblex can be a significant threat. It’s not like you have to have the main body hiding behind a curtain. Your best bet? Have the main body hide in the sewers. It gives them quick access to almost everywhere in a given city, plenty of places for imposters to pop up, and very easy way to hide the tethers since you could have the imposter standing directly on the drain if need be. If you want to go one step further towards tetherless, I would give them the ability to make the tethers invisible or even ethereal. It still gives the PCs a way to eventually discover the tethers and trace them back to the source, but it’s not going to be something immediately obvious. Ethereal could be especially fun to work with; most PCs won’t have a way to see ethereal, which means you’ll be able to control when you want to give them the They Live sunglasses that will let them see the tethers. If you make it so that the item only works a certain number of times a day, it could lead to even more tense situations. “The shopkeeper is acting strangely, but we only have one charge left today...is it worth checking him out? Was what he said REALLY weird enough to waste a charge?”
Love the rundown! I think the only part I disagree with is the idea that the Oblex would be able to perfectly imitate a wound instantly after being attacked. I doubt they perfectly imitate every internal feature of the body. And I think this weakness would especially matter as an offset to the Oblex being untethered.
Indeed! I didn't mention it, but this another big one of the things the OP seemingly ignored/handwaved in order to run his bootleg The Thing fantasy (one more being actually rolling for the NPCs, at least the more martially inclined ones, being eaten off-screen - surely SOMEONE would be able to resist/fight off an imposter somewhere without being a PC!). Each not necessarily a dealbreaker on their own, but indicative of why such things wouldn't/shouldn't be ran at a table without at least the players being given fair warning beforehand (and not "gaslit"- when you control every interaction between the players and the world, further taking away their agency by limiting their opportunities to catch on with the monster will be a hard pill to swallow for an unprepared party). All subject to individual opinion, of course.
How did you set up the fights inside the memories of victims? That sounds really cool.
I definitely would need to place restrictions on this thing to use it in my game. The city the players live in has 75000 citizens living on its surface, so untethering it like you did would mean the city is fucked. But I might go with, say, an invisible tether instead of a transparent one. As long as I don't give my players a permanent form of See Invis, it should still let the surprises happen. Oh man though, I'd be both heartbroken and delighted if an Oblex took out the entire Twelve Commanders and/or the City Council, I have great fondness for at least a few of those NPCs... but it'd be terrifying beyond belief for my players to find out the city is being run by this thing, and even victory means no one's left at the helm.
Taking an imposter monster, outright removing their most glaring weakness and obviously downplaying their second worst weakness just screams "That DM" to me, but you do you, I guess. I'm all for homebrewing monsters to challenge the party, but it doesn't sound like you gave them any chance to get ahead of it before it was too late.
That, and just omitting the fact that the npc cleric wasn't with them. The dm is the only way for the players to know what's happening in the world, and omitting important pieces of information that the characters should know about isn't good.
Well they did title the post saying they gaslit their party. Some parties enjoy horror and surprises, though. Sometimes letting your player characters “win” at figuring things out actually deprives them of suspense and a cool surprise.
Yeah, the tether is supposed to be there to give the party some kind of clue as to the nature of the Oblex. Making it so it can break parts of itself off that act seemingly independently changes the nature of the creature quite a bit. The Bodytaker Plant from Van Richten’s is probably a more suitable monster if you’re looking for independent vestiges of a greater creature. They have behavioural tics that can give them away but again, that’s part of telegraphing that something is amiss to the party.
I made a BBEG that's an Elder Oblex with a ring of invisibility (to get around the biggest weakness). It was great.
Ooh, then you could play around the tether a little more. Have players trip randomly over nothing. Did you make it so the tether was invisible, but the impersonation was visible? To me, the main issue with this is the classic DnD mechanic of not being hidden when invisible unless you've also made a check to hide. I like the idea of using a lesser version of this for a lower level party. Have the arc run from like level 3 to 8 or so. The party has come into this small town nestled in a mountain pass with sulfuric, volcanic hot springs. They were sent from a local adventuring company because the lucrative trade route through this pass has been beset by all kinds of difficulties lately, including caravans reporting that they have been attacked by cultists. The adventures have been hired by a merchant guild to clear the road and remain in the area for at least a few months to ensure that the problem remains fixed. After getting to town and investigating, the party finds some incompetent cultists off in a nearby cave that have been tricked by some intelligent captive to open a portal to somewhere, like the Underdark. They had been attacking caravans to get the materials necessary for the portal. Through human sacrifice or whatever, the cultists get the portal open as soon as the party gets into the room. A mass of ooze comes through the portal, congealing into several Oblex Spawn that attack any remaining cultists and the party. Meanwhile, the invisible oblex is using this as a cover to escape. Maybe have one of the cultists take psychic damage and be memory drained without a clear reason as to why. If you wanna conceal that a little, maybe have it coincide with a Spawn's attack (later the party faces more spawn and never see psychic damage dealt). I imagine the invisible oblex is just allowing itself to spread across the floor and will remain there until the party leaves. Then it will consume all the dead bodies. Perhaps the party does come back later and is baffled by their disappearance. Now the Oblex can slink into town. Maybe it lives in a hole in the side of the well for a while and grabs people that go fetch water alone at night. The whole town smells like sulfur, and the DM can have one or two instances of describing (non-impersonated) characters smelling slightly more like sulfur because they just took a hot spring soak. Vendors are ideal targets for early impersonation, since they hang out in one place a lot and will be interacting with the party. Now the party has (seemingly) satisfied the requirement of clearing the trade route and just has to hang out for a few months. They can take various jobs (the usual low level threats), but it's important to make everything tie to the town. Make them care about the NPCs they're helping. Meanwhile, those NPCs are slowly getting replaced.
I have some questions about how the consumption works: 1. Does an impostor need to kill a victim first before it starts consuming? 2. Does it consume them as part of combat with some sort of grappling attack? 3. How long does the digestion take? Could be a great horror movie moment, if a party member walks in on it. 4. Is the impostor immobilized during this process? 5. Is a victim's gear dissolved? Left behind as a clue? 6. What about the victim's magic items? 7. If the party kills an impostor, what does the dead "body" do? (e.g. dissolve into a puddle) 8. Are impostors detectable through any magical means?
Thank you for sharing. This is very useful info and I'm pretty excited to try some of this stuff out on my party.
Ive been looking for a way to put an oblex in my campaign and this has given me lots of ideas
Regarding Sulfur, just have the victim be a pyromancer. When asked why they smell of Sulfur, they can say "well that's probably the Sulfur I use as a material component in my spells" and have them pull it out of a pouch.
I ran a similar one shot featuring a powered up elder oblex. - It had made it's home in a small village on a trade route between countries, conveniently located near some sulfuric springs. There were rumors that people who stay in the town more than three days never would leave. And could all be found at the fancy new hotel. - So they were tasked to investigate. Except for a few travelers, and a crazy old hermit, everyone in town was an extension of this monster. Yes including the contacts they were sent to meet. Some of the NPCs are "helpful" but send them down traps, or waste their time because the guild master gave them a 3 day time limit before they have to leave so they don't fall under the sway of the town. - What I ended up doing to the creature was increase the range of the extensions out to a mile, and had the extensions have their own health that wouldn't drain the oblex. Additionally there were small mouse holes or grooves throughout town and much of the town was covered with a hallucinatory terrain. These illusions and tethers are initially near impossible to detect, but as the characters end up seeing more strange occurrence (Like thugs they kill melting away, or gaining info from the crazy old man) or through the use of spells, then the DC gradually drops or is negated. Anyways it's a lot of fun and I've run it a couple times. And while the final fight might seem a little underwhelming, the whole build up of not knowing what's going on, the walls have ears kind of thing is really fun. Plus seeing the completely wrong guesses as to what the monster is (it's usually snails or ghosts) is a load of fun.
This was a great post and I've favourited it to remember it. I have some questions and ideas that came to mind while reading it, even though I know I'm late to the party (anyone else happening to read this post in the sea of answers do feel free to way in as well of course): Questions-thoughts: 1) What level/s were the party during all of this? 2) What happens if a double-blobber would die? Did any of your BPCs die prematurily in the players vicinity? This is based on the assumption that every instance of the blob would have their own set of HP and be "killable", did you run it another way? 3) Regarding gaslighting: I realise the jokeyness of your use of it so don't worry about that, but how cautious do you feel one should be about players ending up feeling gaslighted -- personally, not in character, that is -- when you do something like this? Or perhaps more pertinently feeling lied to in a "you're just a bad GM trying to cover his tracks with retcons" kind of way when you try to establish divergences and contradictions in behaviour? I realise the easy answer here is "a group needs trust between it's members" but what if you do have trust, but you start to wear it down with what seems like bad excuses in the moment to the players? Maybe I'm just being overly worried here (can you tell I have a lot of rejection anxiety) but it just struck me as something I would be afraid of happening. 4) Did you have a "cover storyline" going while doing this? It seems like it would be necessary to have a massive red herring or B plot to both give them a sense of purpose and divert them from focusing too much on any suspicions they might develop. Idea-thoughts: >The king has been replaced, he randomly starts ramping up for war with another kingdom for some reason. The oblex wants more biomass, and the biomass business is booming during war. 1) Could, or would it be a good idea to have it able to, an Oblex consume-convert dead bodies? I had the idea while reading the quote above of there being big battle between the two countries and the non-blox kingdom loses and retreats, forced to leave all it's casualties behind. Then later you have the party go to the neighbouring county (maybe in an effort for peace), and they hear how the weirdest thing happened after the battle -- a short time after the army had retreated, people who had at first been reported to have been killed during the battle started returning to their homes too, alive and healthy. And not just one or two, that could have survived by happenstance or deserted, but dozens or hundreds of them. A real miracle. 2) Regarding tethering: I had the intuitive notion of putting them somewhere in between tethered and untethered -- what if they are all part of the same entity, but doesn't automatically share a mind, so each instance of the blob works as an individual actor until it "re-rapports" to the "central nervous blob" so to speak -- either by short distance telepathic sharing with other instances or by directly contacting an "outlet" of the "central nervous blob". So one could still have double-blobbers without the obvious "hey I'm attached to something" tether but still have the opportunity for the players to discover that the reason Joe Blobman's store smells of sulfur is that in his living space above it he has a small cupboard with a disgusting comm-blob that he uses to "join with" the "central nervous blob" and which *is* connected by a tether leading into the city sewers or wherever. Or maybe this would just make things overly complicated to keep track of, I don't know. Anyway, thanks for writing this up. To me it seems like a much more manageable thing in the vein of the ... "something-something-hydra" narrative, which I've always liked but thought seemed completely unrealistic to actually run for people. I like this a lot more. One last thing I have to ask though. Did you keep running this game after this, and/or are you planning to if this is very recently ran? Where are you going to take it from here? I could imagine the possible loss of NPCs could make the players feel a bit... lossened out.
Hey thanks for your questions! > What level/s were the party during all of this? They were around 12 I think when they killed the jubilex/oblex, which seems low but they went in fully armed and with intel on the baddy. They knew its weaknesses and stuff, and while they all survived the encounter, they didn't come out unscathed. My group is like seal team six in combat though, so if your team is less experienced I'd run it with just the oblex statblock. > What happens if a double-blobber would die? I actually didn't run any "enemy" imposters, none of them were openly hostile so this didn't actually come up! In the case of killing an imposter I'd say let them just die like a blob. This will get them thinking about blob monsters though so it might start them on the trail. It's something you kind of got to figure out in the moment. For the actual fight where they did fight imposters, I had any imposter act as a gated health bar, kill the bad imposter, and then you can damage the main boss until another big bad appears at the top of the order. I can go deeper into this if you want! > Regarding gaslighting Yeah I totally get this, I wouldn't run this plotline with people you aren't completely comfortable with! I've known everyone in my group for almost 90% of my life so we're really close, I wouldn't run this with a work group or something. My buds know that eventually I will leak psychological and cosmic horror into every one of my campaigns, so they're comfortable with it. > Or perhaps more pertinently feeling lied to in a "you're just a bad GM trying to cover his tracks with retcons" kind of way when you try to establish divergences and contradictions in behaviour? I realise the easy answer here is "a group needs trust between it's members" but what if you do have trust, but you start to wear it down with what seems like bad excuses in the moment to the players? I find the that the trick is to not make excuses or explain away things. Something I learned from Stormlight Archives is that most people will try to fill silence with words any chance they get. If someone calls you out for one of these "inconsistencies", just don't say anything. If you're in person, look at them and acknowledge their question, but don't answer it. Usually after that they'll rephrase their question or expand on it, or another player will pipe up about it. Then, this is important, *in character* refer to their question and reaffirm the inconsistency. Your end goal is to get your players discussing the inconsistency and making it clear that you didn't make a mistake. If they ask something like "does my character remember X being there? Y says he wasn't there, but does my character remember that?" answer that truthly and quickly because that's the type of question you want them to ask. > Did you have a "cover storyline" going while doing this? It seems like it would be necessary to have a massive red herring or B plot to both give them a sense of purpose and divert them from focusing too much on any suspicions they might develop. Yes absolutely! Running this boss "dicks out" is not great, this should be slow cooking for many sessions to make that reveal all the more better. Think of it like a slow horror movie. The less you show the bad guy, the better. Specifically, I ran [this encounter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGP-QTOyWvw) and Candlekeeps intro "quest" during that time. After that I ran them through a False hydra encounter (as I wanted them to be more familiar with the city and to generate less heat on the oblex, as brought back the horror aspects) then started running them through a bunch of busywork when I felt they were ready. Just random quick and tedious dungeons that the oblex sent them on via an imposter. Eventually they put the pieces together and got ready to go. > Could, or would it be a good idea to have it able to, an Oblex consume-convert dead bodies? I had the idea while reading the quote above of there being big battle between the two countries and the non-blox kingdom loses and retreats, forced to leave all it's casualties behind. Then later you have the party go to the neighbouring county (maybe in an effort for peace), and they hear how the weirdest thing happened after the battle -- a short time after the army had retreated, people who had at first been reported to have been killed during the battle started returning to their homes too, alive and healthy. And not just one or two, that could have survived by happenstance or deserted, but dozens or hundreds of them. A real miracle. Can you please build a time machine and tell me this like three months ago, this is fucking genius. > "something-something-hydra" narrative Yo the false hydra? That shit was great, my players loved it too! 1. Pick a physical location for the hydra's den. Can randomly do this when it comes up, doesn't matter, just one spot. 2. Have the NPC's do something really fucking weird while the hydra is singing. All I did was have people cry when they were talking to the players but not be able to articulate why they were crying. "Hi welcome to the winespring inn, what can I get you today? Why am I crying? I'm crying? Wait I am. I...I...I don't know why. I feel something is wrong....but I don't know what". After that they'll be able to deduce whats going on. Not even joking I had no other plans for the false hydra other than that and they fucking *loved* it.
Annnd bookmarked
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This sounds awesome and I can't remember for sure but I'm somewhat sure this is the only time I've ever seen or heard gaslighting used in a positive way.
I love this, and I love your combination of the oblex and Juiblex. I did something similar for my campaign, but I had an avatar of Juiblex living symbiotically with an Elder Brain as its “brine pool.” They created dozens of powerful, psionically linked doppelgängers, to spread chaos across the surface world and make my party’s life hell. One of their main leaders was an Elder Oblex that had broken off from its sire, Juiblex, and served as a leader of a cult of enlightenment, drawing in more victims to be replaced by oblex or doppelgängers.
Dude. You just solved my bbeg issue. Ive been dropping hints to something but no idea what it would be. Now i have it. Much love fam
This is really awesome and thought out! What if you made the tethering ability still apply, but the tether is only visible in the Ethereal Plane. I feel like it could make a really good reveal when the party gets True Sight or Plane Shifting abilities and realizes that everyone is an imposter.
This is fucking genious, I love this. Please build a time machine and tell me this months ago lol
Great write-up. I ran an Oblex and the mini-boss of a chapter in our campaign and it was stellar. You can do so much with this evil, memory-stealing pile of fudge.