Monster Monday: Ikuchi, the Living Tentacle

The whale corpse reeked worse than a day-old battlefield, but that is not why the villagers avoided the shore. Something was out there, they said. A great squid or a sea serpent. A toothless old man mumbled something about the restless spirits of the dead. Matsushita Ino was not afraid of a sea monster. She had slain seven oni in the mountains not a week ago. But she had sworn an oath to burn incense at the shrine on Onobai island before the last cherry blossoms fell, and now there was no one to ferry her across. The town's fishing fleet was pulled high up on the beach, well past even the stinking whale corpse with its twisting pattern of puckered, circular scars.

   "Very well!" she raised her voice once again above the murmuring crowd. "If there are none here who will help me - a sworn warrior of your lord - out of duty and honor, perhaps silver will give you the courage to row for me." She held up a string of jangling silver coins - enough to buy a boat outright in a village this poor. One man stood forward, bald and wizened. Wordlessly, he took the coins, handed them off to an equally ancient woman, nodded to her solemnly, then led Ino to the shore.

   His boat was small, but he used it like it was a part of his own body. Ino tried to make conversation with the leathery old salt, but he just smiled and nodded and kept working the oars. They were halfway to Onobai before she realized he was mute. She took up a position in the prow, hand upon the hilt of her nodachi, grey eyes scanning the sea for the promised threat. It was not long in showing itself.

   It started as a ripple of water moving against the wind. Then the tentacle breached the surface, bristling with serrated suckers. So it was a giant squid after all. She drew her nodachi, ready to strike out with the long blade at the slightest provocation. No, not a giant squid - the creature was a single, free-swimming tentacle, tapering to a point at both ends, thick around as a tree trunk, and covered in those toothy suckers. She had read about these. Ikuchi. Ship-renders. Hungering tentacles from the deep, not often seen in shallow seas such as this. Spring had brought more than cherry blossoms to the shores of Achikara.

   The tentacle circled the boat once, then struck. Both ends of the ikuchi shot up, wrapping around the prow and stern. Ino lashed out, quick as a crane, her blue blade biting into the rubbery flesh. It twisted itself around the boat like a coil of rope. The old sailor seemed to pay it no heed; his face as he rowed was that of a samurai going into a duel - confidence masking resignation. Ino leapt back as the prow of the boat splintered. The tentacle continued to constrict, cracking the wale of the boat. Water was seeping in. Ino struck at the ikuchi thrice, and thrice more, each time cutting a deep gouge in the beast, but it never relinquished its hold. It would crush the boat before Ino could cut through it.

   The old sailor caught her eye. He had stopped rowing, and was standing in the boat, holding a splintered oar like a spear. He gave her the same solemn nod he had given the old woman in the village. Ino nodded back. Channeling all her strength, she brought her nodachi down on the thickest part of the tentacle, cutting deep like a woodsman's axe. The blade shattered inside the beast. The old sailor came down a moment later, driving the sharp end of the oar down into the cut she had made. The tentacle writhed, ripping the boat to flinders. As Ino hit the water, she saw the tentacle wrap completely around the old sailor, ready to tear him apart as easily as it had his boat.

   All sense was muffled by the shocking cold water. Ino dropped the hilt of her broken sword and fumbled to undo the ties on her kusari katabira - the heavy silk-covered coat of mail links was dragging her deep into the sea. Breath burning in her lungs, she shrugged the armor off and kicked back up to the surface in time to see the wounded ikuchi, blood seeping from dozens of cuts, slither off into the depths.

   Matsushita Ino lay back in and breathed deep, letting the salt water and the tide carry her toward Onobai. She closed her eyes and said:

Dead whale. Spiral scars.

Blossoms fall on the red sea

where ikuchi feeds.

Ikuchi illustration by Toriyama Sekien for the Konjaku Hyakki Shūi (1781), via Wikimedia

~~~~~~~~

Today's Monster Monday is the ikuchi, a giant living tentacle from (where else?) Japan. This free-swimming tentacle can wrap itself around ships and crush them to get at the tasty sailors within.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2017 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Colossal Octopus, Tentacle of the Deep

Today's Monster Monday (apologies for missing last week's post) is the colossal octopus, a tremendous being from the inky black depths of the sea, larger even than the legendary kraken. This being is a force of nature; a terror to shipping and to coastal communities.

Drawing by Pierre Dénys de Montfort, via Wikimedia

The kraken is a threat thanks not only to its immense size but also to its cunning (Int 21, Wis 20) and its innate magic. The colossal octopus, on the other hand, is a wholly non-magical animal, but nonetheless a true monster of the seas. With eight tentacle attacks and a powerful bite, this beast is built to take on a whole ship full of adventurers. It clocks in at Challenge Rating 13, which means it is an accessible opponent for more adventuring parties than the CR 18 kraken. The description also includes rules for hacking off its tentacles individually, because how could there not be? I'm actually kind of baffled by how the tentacle chopping that was a part of the kraken's stat block in D&D 3.5 disappeared in the Pathfinder version.

Back in the days of the Enlightenment, as humankind's approach to studying the natural world transitioned from the natural philosophy of earlier times to the more rigorous scientific method, both the kraken and the gigantic octopus were occasionally considered to be real creatures. Carl Linnaeus, the father of the modern taxonomy himself, included the kraken (under the scientific name Microcosmus marinus) in the first edition of Systema Naturae, published in 1735. The French naturalist Pierre Dénys de Montfort included both the kraken and what he described as the larger "poulpe colossal" (colossal octopus) in his 1802 work, Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques.

Drawing by Pierre Dénys de Montfort, via Wikimedia

These vestiges of myth and legend were soon scrubbed from scientific literature due to a lack of evidence, but it is worth noting why they ever made it to those pages in the first place. While we may take for granted that creatures like the colossal octopus are pure myth, early naturalists did not have the luxury of such certainty, especially when it came to the mysterious ocean depths. Naturalists used not only their own observations in their descriptions of the natural world, but also reports from others, studiously collecting and analyzing eyewitness accounts, local legends, and the writings of their ancient and medieval fore-bearers. The kraken and colossal octopus were represented in those sources just as the real monsters of the deep were; the fact that the immense carcasses of the otherwise unbelievable giant squid and blue whale occasionally washed ashore only served to lend credence to the idea that these other abyssal titans might exist somewhere out there in the unplumbed depths of the boundless ocean.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2017 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Haietlik, The Lightning-Tongued Sea Serpent

Today's Monster Monday is the haietlik, a sea serpent from the mythology and folklore of Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) peoples of the Pacific Northwest.  According to legend, these lightning serpents had knife-sharp heads and could spit lightning from their tongues.  They were allies of the thunderbirds (the mythological creature, not the 1960s supermarionation show), who used them to hunt whales.

Before I get to the monster, here's some insight into how I research creatures like this before statting them up.  I first encountered the haietlik on Wikipedia.  Now, I'm not one of those people who thinks Wikipedia is a den of crowd-sourced lies devoid of any merit, but I do think it is important to take information found on Wikipedia with a grain of salt, especially if the article is very short and relies entirely on a single source which is just a link to a defunct webpage.  I liked the information that Wikipedia gave though: a sea serpent that hunts whales with its sharp head and lightning breath.  I just needed this depiction of the monster to be confirmed by other sources.

My first step is to check my ever-growing library of books on mythology, folklore, and legendary creatures.  Sadly, I do not yet have a book on the myths of Pacific Northwest Native Americans, and most general books on mythology tend to gloss over or largely ignore Native American myths.  Fortunately, there is an entry on the haietlik in Giants, Monsters & Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth, by Carol Rose, one of my go-to reference works for mythological creatures.  The entry (fairly good-sized for such an obscure monster) added that the haietlik hunted in coastal waters, that many pictograms of the beast could be found on rocks in the area, and that the skin of a haietlik brought good luck to whale-hunters.  Unfortunately, it said nothing of the creature's lightning breath or knife-sharp head.  None of my other books mentioned the haietlik, so I took to the internet again.  Googling around for more information of stub Wikipedia articles about mythological creatures rarely bears fruit.  Often, you will only find third-party wikis that regurgitate the same information from Wikipedia, cryptozoology wikis which have their own issues with reliability, and blogs of people talking about the esoteric monsters they've put in their own campaign settings (like this blog, I guess).  I was hoping to luck out and find a website that records Native American myths (like this awesome bilingual about inuit myth) but I had no such luck here.

Stuck, I went back to the defunct link from Wikipedia and took it through the Internet Wayback Machine.  Awesomely, the haietlik appears on the squadron badge of the RCAF's 442 Transport & Rescue Squadron.  Their website, as it appeared in 2007, describes the haietlik as the whale-hunting, knife-nosed, lightning-shooting sea serpent that I initially saw on Wikipedia.  I now have two sources to work from, which is less than I would like, but all I'm going to be able to get right now.  And at least I have the knowledge that my interpretation of this mythical beast is at least in accordance with that of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Squadron Badge of the RCAF 442 Transport & Rescue Squadron

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2016 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Ketos, Sea Monster of Divine Retribution

Today's Monster Monday is the ketos, an ancient sea monster from Greek and Biblical mythology.  This is the monster that Poseidon sent to eat Andromeda, and that Perseus petrified with Medusa’s severed head.  The ketos is also frequently shown as the sea monster that swallowed Jonah in late classical and medieval depictions of the story.  In both cases, it is a monster sent by a deity to punish the impious by eating someone.

Andromeda liberata da Perseo by Piero di Cosimo, via Wikimedia

Herakles, appropriating the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, apparently also rescued a princess from a ketos, doing so in true herculean fashion by leaping into its mouth and slaying it from within.  In 58 BC, the Romans put the bones of what they believed to be the ketos that Perseus slew on display during gladiatorial games.  The bones were described as “forty feet long, with ribs taller than an Indian elephant, and spines eighteen inches thick.” 

Image ©Peter on flikr

"Hercules Slays the Ketos" from vase painting in Athens, Stavros S Niarchos Collection.

Many medieval depictions of the inside of the whale emphasize its overwhelming heat, to the point where at least one such depiction has Jonah going bald from the heat.  In a late tenth century tale recounted by the French monk Letaldus, with parallels to the story of Jonah, a fisherman named Within is swallowed by a great whale and kills the whale by setting his boat on fire and attacking the creature’s insides with his sword.  After four days and five nights, he is washed up in the whale's carcass and emerges hairless.  The whale that swallows Within is likened to Scylla and Charybdis, and described “with snake-like teeth and with an ever gaping gullet, a gullet that could tumble entire cities to the underworld.”  

Photo by wmpearl, via Wikimedia

Jonah Cast Up, 280-290 CE, marble, late Roman, Asia Minor, Cleveland Museum of Art

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.