Monster Monday: Gelatinous Hypercube - The Slime Out of Time

Today's Monster Monday is the gelatinous hypercube, an ooze from the astral plane that has become untethered from causality. To the eyes of those who travel forward through time at a constant rate and for whom actions precede reactions (that is to say, most mortals), gelatinous hypercubes seem to rapidly shift between different versions of themselves, often jumping around erratically in space as they appear at random points on their personal timelines. Those engulfed by the gelatinous hypercube find themselves frozen in time and rapidly aged or de-aged at random.

Yeah, it's sort of a joke monster, but gelatinous cubes are sort of joke monsters too.

tesseract gif by Jason Hise via Wikimedia

A gelatinous hypercube prowls the astral sea

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2018 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Tasmanian Devil & Dire Tasmanian Devil

Today's Monster Monday is the Tasmanian devil and the dire Tasmanian devil. Sometimes called the "marsupial wolverine" by me and at least one other person, Tasmanian devils are fierce little critters from the island of Tasmania off the south coast of Australia. At about 2 feet long, the Tasmanian devil is the largest living marsupial carnivore. They may not be big, but their jaws are so strong that these guys can eat bones. They just munch 'em down like it's no big deal, even though whenever I try to eat a chicken wing bone my dentist yells at me.

photo by Mike Lehmann, via Wikimedia

So cute! Does it really deserve to be called a devil?

The devils got their name because, when they get together at night to feast on a delicious carcass, they let out terrifying screeches. When white settlers in Tasmania heard unearthly howls and crunching bones coming out of the already none-too-friendly Australian night, they thought that was fairly devil-like. They usually eat carrion, but they can take down prey when they need to - they can even take down a small kangaroo if pressed.

What about the dire Tasmanian devil? A lot of dire animals in D&D and fantasy in general are based on actual prehistoric creatures. This started with the dire wolf, canis dirus, which was a slightly bigger than normal wolves. Fantasy game designers ran with the exciting 'dire' descriptor and applied it to a slew of prehistoric animals like the short-faced bear and irish elk. They didn't stop there, though, creating 'dire' versions of animals with no real prehistoric equivalent, like dire weasels and dire badgers. The dire Tasmanian devil is one of the latter. Although there were larger prehistoric devils in Australia, Sarcophilus laniarius, they were only slightly larger than modern devils, not five feet long like the dire Tasmanian devil below. I took some creative license because I like 'dire' animals.

via Wikimedia

Tasmanian devil skull. Nice teeth.

I've been using the name 'Tasmanian devil' a lot in this post, but you won't see it in the stat block below. Why? Let's talk some more about real-world names in fantasy worlds. I mentioned back in my titanosaur post how names that reference real-world places (like the Argentinosaurus from Argentina) don't really work in a fantasy world. The Tasmanian devil finds itself in a very similar situation, given that most fantasy worlds do not have an island called Tasmania, let alone the Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman for whom the island was named. Take away 'Tasmanian' and you are left with just 'devil', which is rather broad and pretty confusing, especially in a world where real extraplanar devils exist.

I ran through several potential alternative names before settling down on one. 'Devil quoll' sort of works - quolls are a related cat-sized marsupial carnivore that are smaller and less bitey than Tasmanian devils, but if I named it 'devil quoll' I'd have to explain what quolls are. 'Marsupial devil' gets the idea across fairly well, but it also conjures up images of Satan with a pouch full of babies on his tummy. Its genus, sarcophilus, sounds pretty cool but it sounds more like a dinosaur than a fuzzy little guy. Eventually I settled on 'tarrabah', which is one of the Tasmanian Aboriginal names for the creature recorded by early white settlers, along with 'poirinnah' and 'par-loo-mer-rer' - I went with tarrabah because it starts with a 't' like Tasmanian devil. If you incorporate it into your campaign (and boy have I been giving a lot of thought to an Australian-inspired fantasy world), call it by any of those names or none of them.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2018 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Bellwether - It Tolls for Thee

Today's Monster Monday is the bellwether, a black ram with a large bronze bell in place of its head. This harbinger of doom delivers blasts of pummeling sonic energy with every toll, leaving its targets shaken. If the bellwether is not stopped before it tolls thirteen times, all who hear its final bell are cursed, and the surrounding land is left blighted.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2018 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Termite Mound Guardian, a Swarm-Filled Construct

Today's Monster Monday is the termite mound guardian, a druidic construct full of swarming, biting termites. Crafted from the gigantic termite mounds found in the tropical regions of the world, these stalwart defenders are often created to protect villages, natural resources, or sacred spaces. From a distance, they appear to be ordinary termite mounds, but when interlopers approach, they rise out of the ground, taking on a roughly humanoid form. A flood of angry termites pours from a thousand tiny tunnels throughout its body, massing against the enemy, while other warrior termites take up defensive positions along the mound's body, ready to bite any who make contact with it.

via Wikimedia

5 meter high Cathedral Termite Mound - Litchfield National Park, Northern Territory, Australia

I like the idea that there is a whole range of naturalistic constructs that only druids can make. Like, if a wizard saw a termite mound guardian, they might think, "Why not just make a clay golem?" But druids see these as something that augments and complements nature, where golems are something that contravenes the natural order.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2018 Jonah Bomgaars.