D&D Monsters That I Love
A semi-random exploration of just some monsters/creatures from D&D (that aren’t dragons) that I love the concepts or the lore or the ideas of. Reading back over it, it does tend towards horror just a bit, but eh. Also includes oozes, because oozes. And flumphs, because flumphs.
Allip
Okay, so this is my love of cosmic/lovecraftian horror speaking, but. Allips. They’re the shattered spectral remains of creatures that learned what man was not meant to know, that found protected cosmic secrets and had their minds and bodies shattered by the knowledge and the powers that protected it, leaving only maddened spectres that wander the world trying to share the deathly insight that damned them. People who survive attacks from them can suffer strange dreams and fragments of knowledge, and compulsions to seek out more hints of the hidden secrets. And scholars can be essentially possessed by Allips, driven to write to the point of death, which allows the Allip itself to finally rest, but leaves its secrets hidden in the poor scholar’s manuscripts to shatter some other mind and create a new Allip in their wake.
… Look. Cosmic secrets we were not meant to know. Maddened spectres trying desperately to share the knowledge that destroyed them. Haunted manuscripts that spread knowledge and madness. I LOVE allips. So much. I would have a whole campaign about a team of librarian/scholars searching the world for allip manuscripts, both to gather them and protect the innocent from them, but also for the lure of forbidden knowledge. Perfect creature. I adore them.
Boneless
This is a perfectly appalling tiny monster and I love it. Someone animated the sloughed off skin of a corpse to make a horrible floppy boneless smothering thing. It’s horrific. The second I saw the art of it I said no. Excellent monster. Extremely illustrative of the necromancer that created it.
Cadaver Collector
Giant shambling robots that wander the world mindlessly collecting corpses and impaling them on their armour, who can summon the ghosts of said corpses to defend themselves. That’s just. I mean. The lore that they’re originally from hell and summoned to collect the dead of war is also cool, but I feel you can uncouple them from that and just make … a giant question of a creature for people to encounter. Like. Why? What tragedy created this lumbering horrific echo of a being? What was it made for? By who? There are giant, absolutely lethal robots wandering the world just … collecting bodies. For reasons. What a thing to put in a world.
If you gave it more intelligence, you’d have a hell of an existential question of an existence, too. A cadaver collector that woke up and realised what it was doing. That’d be a thing.
Coldlight Walker
The imagery of these undead is just fantastic. Frozen corpses in the snow that get up and start walking again, the baleful glare of their deathly light shining from furred hoods. Just A+++ imagery. My dad read us The Cremation of Sam McGee as kids, it’s possible it warped some things, but I adore the picture of the snow fields and the blizzards and the auroras and the glowing hateful walkers appearing from the snow. Perfect.
Flumph
They’re cheerful psychic jellyfish who jet around the Underdark looking for good vibes. They change colours like a mood ring. They’re named after the sound they make propelling themselves through the air. They live in psychic communes just vibing with each other, and feed by taking little sips from people’s mental energy. They often get stuck feeding on dark monsters just because many psions in D&D are shades of evil, so then they go hovering around looking for nice people to inform so they can clear the bad vibes out for them. What is not to love about them? Flumphs are the tiny little psychic hippies of the aberration world, cheerful little hovering jellyfish people who make flumph noises as they zoom around. They’re delightful. I want a flumph friend RL right now.
Gelatinous Cube
Okay. Put it this way. My sister came up to me and said she’d found a toy/figurine of my favourite D&D monster, and I started saying ‘which one?’ before instantly going ‘an ooze? a gelatinous cube!’. It was, in fact, a gelatinous cube. So even RL people know that I just really love oozes. And this particular ooze was my first, all the way back playing a computer game called Castle of the Winds as a kid. What is it about oozes that I love? I could not tell you. But I do. These weird creatures just schlorping around the world, minding their own business and devouring things. Living in sewers and caves and hoovering up all the organic detritus of the world. The gelatinous cube as this invisible, tunnel-sized piece of mobile digestive fluid that occasionally just absorbs passers-by and starts digesting them. Why is it a cube? It’s a vaguely sentient collection of acidic goo, why is it a shape with edges, instead of something sensible like a sphere or even just a blob? Because, out of universe, it needed to fully fill a square on the game grid. But in universe? Who knows. Because people build square tunnels? Because it’s extremely rudimentary intellect finds it a satisfying shape to exist in? How does a gelatinous cube experience the world? We just don’t know.
I love oozes. Seriously. They feel like such parts of an ecosystem. A magic-infested one, sure, but an ecosystem nonetheless. They’re the cleaners of the universe. They schlorp around eating things, and that’s their life. If you build a sewer, they will come along and schlorp in it. I love them.
Hollyphant
It’s a tiny golden flying divine elephant. I don’t know what to tell you. They’re adorable. And, yes, highly intelligent and good-hearted and stalwart defenders against evil, and I feel a little bit bad and condescending when I think this, but my brain really does get stuck on adorable. One of its attacks is called Trumpet of Sparkles (which, mind you, does decent radiant damage, but still). And, yes, it can also transform into a considerably less tiny flying golden mammoth, but. They’re really really really really cute. And I really do get stuck on it.
Let’s just say, if you put a hollyphant down in front of me in a game, I would die for them on the spot, no questions asked. And if any creature ever hurt a hollyphant in my presence, I would murder them on the spot, or I would die trying. Picture that meme of Rosa from B99 with her puppy.
Nightwalker
Going back to horror now. I adore the lore of the Nightwalker. I have no idea why it struck me so strongly, but it’s fascinating. The Negative Plane, this realm of raw antilife, this inimical place. If you get too close to it, if you try to siphon its power, or perhaps try to enter it, that absolute idiotic extreme of the need to know and explore, and somehow survive, at least for a time, then you are sucked into and trapped inside the plane, and this thing emerges to replace you. This 20ft tall midnight giant, this spectre of walking death that annihilates anything in its aura. The Nightwalker. And it’s connected to you. It’s drawn to the parts of this new, lively world that mean something to you. You have, in your foolishness or ill-luck, unleashed a raw force of death on all that you love, while you yourself are trapped in a plane of death and cannot emerge unless the Nightwalker bound to you is lured back to the Negative Plane. If it is destroyed, you are doomed.
And it’s not particularly intelligent. It doesn’t really come from a place that has a lot of need for intelligence. It just explores and destroys the world you’ve brought it to out of vague curiosity and the echoes of your passions. It’s just … such a terrible, childlike expression of your hubris or your ill-fortune. You have brought death, raw and childlike and inimical to all it encounters.
I just like the Nightwalker. Its lore. I like it a lot.
Oblex
To go back and finish on an ooze. Because oozes. And the Oblex is such a cool ooze. There’s a bit of the flumph in there, a bit of a similar theme, but oh, so much darker. Oblexes eat memories. And can then use those memories to create (extrude) a duplicate of the person, a puppet on a slimy string, to lure other meals in. It’s such an amazing cosmic horror/B-movie sci-fi sort of creature. You go into a roadside inn, and the barmaid and several of the patrons smell slightly sulphurous but you don’t pay too much attention to it, and then when you go upstairs to rest some horrifying red jelly creature grabs you in your sleep and tries to eat your memories so it can add your duplicate to the puppet show downstairs. IDK, it’s just cool. The perfect mini-adventure of a creature, a complete horrifying little wayside story to stumble across. It’s an ooze, an intelligent ooze, a sentient lump of jelly, that eats memories. That hungers for minds to feed on. And if it gets too big, eats too many, becomes too bloated on other minds and other memories and other dreams, then it spawns more of itself to split the load. A single oblex is terrifying enough, but if it gets too established, too well-fed, then you potentially have a much greater problem on your hands. I have watched that movie, and I will play that game!
In conclusion? Oozes. Also horror fantasy. And cute elephants. Heh.