Monsters Reimagined: Quori
I love monsters that deal with dreams and the unconscious, partially because it seems an untapped avenue of creative exploration when it comes to d&d adventure writing, but mostly because it lets me use trippy dream imagery to tell a story.
Whatâs interesting though is that there arenât many d&d baddies deal with dreams, aside from creatures like nighthags and other entities that use the dream/nightmare spells to deliver their messages/scorn from afar.
Eberron has the Quori, but as it stand these invisible manipulators are deeply tied to that history/setting, and actually have very little to do with dreams playing more into the âpsychic invadersâ trope. That said, they do have a few cool tricks, and a great name to riff off of, so riff I shall.
TLDR: As setting neutral antagonists, the Quori are a form of phantasmal predator that leech off the fears of dreaming beings. The more advanced members of their kind steal interesting minds to act as servitors, retreating back to the nightmare cities they maintain in the astral sea.
The Basics: Quori are native inhabitants of the astral sea, and are beings composed of pure thought. Few can say whether they originated as embodied beings at some point, or whether they were simply created this way, but it is safe to say they are largely ignorant of what it is to be tethered by flesh. As such, most Quori have no solid form, instead reflecting the dreams and fears of whichever people they happen to be haunting: multitudinous eyes for the paranoid, skittering appendages for the squeamish, flicking silhouettes for those burdened by night terrors.
Most Quori are content to be psychic scavengers, stoking sleeping minds into fretful imaginings while tagging along in troubled thoughts during waking hours. In this way a single Quori can persist for centuries, moving from mind to mind throughout a populated settlement. Occasionally however one of these scavenging Quori will encounter a bone-chilling terror, a burning rage, or a delirious mania so strong that they become self sustaining. Freed then from the need and the mutability that comes from savaging from other minds, this Quori becomes âlucidâ, self willed, capable of returning to the astral sea without fear of dissolution.Â
These Lucid are literal thought leaders of their kind, capable of sustaining droves of their lesser kin without the need for mortal minds while at the same time coloring their outlooks and personalities as echoes of their own. Though most lucid lord their position over others of their kind, most are quietly aware that too many followers risk exhausting their emotional stores, reducing them back to scavengers at best or creating a feeding frenzy at worse. As such the Lucid covet and cultivate strong mortal emotions, the way a greedy lord might overtax their populace to ensure that the cutthroat mercenaries they employ remain wellpaid.Â
