Have you ever been in a game with a False Hydra, Veeky Forums?
Copy-pasting from the article that Veeky Forums won't let me link to:
>Common wisdom holds that false hydras come from the ground. They spontaneously originate as undifferentiated masses of flesh. Potatoes that sprout from no seed. Supposedly, they germinate in response to lies, and that each falsehood causes a false hydra to swell larger.
>Scholars agree, because they have no better idea. In fact, so much about these abominations boggles the mind that scholars really don't know where to begin.
>Paranoia dominates any discussion about it. Everyone wants to know: Is it here? Is it in my town? Is that long, flaccid face watching me through the window even now?
>There are false alarms. Criminals and deserters have pleaded that they were merely under the influence of the false hydra, or that they were merely trying to escape it's influence. And sometimes that was the truth.
>There are ghost towns in the Grey Waste. Victims of false hydras. People do not revisit those sites, out of fear of vengeful ghosts. And perhaps the false hydra is still there, the black rot at the center of the bone. And how would you know?
>In gentler lands you will find skeptics. These erudite scholars will stroke their chin and calmly tell you that there is no such thing as a false hydra. It is some confabulation. Villages seized by some infectious insanity, or perhaps some subtle demon.
>But they are wrong.
Infiltration
>The false hydra enters a town through a humble enough method. Fattened on worms, it has been growing upwards these last few days (weeks? years?), but has only now broken through the soil. It emerges in a basement, from behind the jars of fruit preserve. Or pushes its face up through a broken cobblestone. And then it begins to sing.
>While it sings, it is ignored. It just creates gaps in your attention and then slips through them. It is subtler than invisibility, and more reliable.
>At this point, the false hydra is only a torso--presumably about the same size as a man's--buried somewhere in the ground. The neck grows up, up until the head emerges from the ground. The head is only the size of a man's head at this point. It resembles a man's head, too, but white, hairless, and with thick deformities of the brow and lips. The eyes are wet holes.
>But of course, none of this is noticed. While it sings, the hydra exists in our blind spot.
Connor Ward
Growth
>The hydra eats people, of course. To eat someone, it must usually stop singing, which endangers the hydra someone, since it can now be noticed. To make this task easier, the hydra usually drags the unfortunate victim a short distance underground, into a basement, sewer, or small chamber that it has excavated, and devours them there.
>A man is walking along a deserted street. Suddenly he realizes that the silence is more profound, as if a loud noise had just ceased. There is a rattle as a sewer grate slides over rough stone. In that darkness, a fleshy face, leering with undisguised hunger. It lunges forward on a thick neck that slides out of the darkness like a sheath, one foot, three feet, six feet long. And then it bites him on the arm and drags him down that narrow gap, yanking and twisting to fit the man's body through that too-small space. And when the sounds of eating have ceased, the song resumes.
>The man has family, friends who will notice his absence. But the song of the hydra massages their mind, smoothing the wrinkles on their brain. The hydra has eaten the man, who is now known to the hydra. The song erases the memories from their soft heads. They will not notice his absence, nor remember him.
>And in this way, the hydra grows. It's neck stretches long. . . longer. And with it, its influence.
Daniel Hernandez
Dissonance
>The false hydra's song hides the memories of the devoured victims in the same way that it hides the false hydra, but this is not a perfect system.
>Wives will wonder why there are men's clothes in her closet. People will notice that no one has lit the street lanterns these last few nights. Churches suddenly find themselves without a bell ringer.
>By and large, these gaps close themselves up. The wife will forget about the clothes as soon as she stops looking at them. Or she will conveniently remember how her brother left them there the last time he visited. Or she will, on some level, recognize the wrongness implicit in the clothes, and throw them away one moonless night. She will confabulate, powerfully and constantly.
>But part of her mind is cognizant of the disturbance. That part of her mind is distrusted, and sealed away. But that primordial cluster of neurons still fires. A syphilitic madman who has been locked in the attic by his family, but whose mutters can sometimes be heard during the lulls in the dinner party downstairs.
>This creates pressure. In the early stages, this feels like paranoia, especially the sense that someone is watching you (and the hydra is watching you, pressing its moony face up against the window and fogging up the glass). More severe symptoms develop. Reminiscing becomes a stressful and uneasy experience, and so is avoided. Distortions of memory. The confabulations pile up, identities become muddled. Friend's faces seems subtly deformed.
>Human brains were not meant to bear this weight. Mundane insanities sprout like mushrooms. Nervous disorders. Psychotic breaks.
Caleb Parker
>In severe cases, split-brain occurs, when one part of the brain strives to communicate with the other. One of the PC's limbs might suddenly become its own entity, one that crudely and violently struggles to convey the danger to the PC.
>A PC might wake up and discover that someone has scratched "IT'S WACHING YOU RIGHT NOW. THE WINDOW." into their chest, and there is skin beneath the fingernails of their left arm, great. If they receive a distressed letter from their mother, wanting to know why the last letter the PC sent contained the sentence "it ate him ate him in front of me but i did not see it ate him" inserted in the middle, great. If they decide that their hand is possessed by demons and cut it off, best of all.
>This could also be the hook for the PCs: an acquaintance sends them an innocuous letter that somehow contains the phrase "help me for the love of god help me help". When they get there, the acquaintance has no memory of writing it, but looks nervous (and a little bit insane) while claiming that it's probably just some wizard's prank.
>"And where is your wife?"
>"Why, I've never married. Why would you joke about this?"
>And the next day, tell the players that their PCs have forgotten about the wife as well. You can't get rid of the metagame knowledge in their heads, but allow them to act on their metagame knowledge whenever they can roleplay an intense feeling of paranoia or distress.
>Their dreams are filled with dirges, spilling from the mouths of faceless people. And somewhere, a pale face, whose eyes are nothing but wet, black holes.
Mason Baker
Proliferation
>As the false hydra matures, it grows more heads. The process accelerates exponentially. More blood on the cobblestones. More incongruities festering in heads like gangrenous limbs.
>The false hydra gets careless. With every meal, it becomes more powerful, more able to smother mankind. It doesn't need to be careful anymore.
>The heads stretch up higher. Their gracile necks sway above the rooftops. Their heads have grown feral. The skull bulges with masses of bone. The lower jaw juts out, low-slung, like a dagger in a fist. Soon, it will finish devouring this city.
>But darling, my darling, there isn't enough blood in all the world to slake its thirst.
Attack
>The players may suspect that something is invisible, but the usual magical countermeasures for fighting invisibility won't work here. The song is closer to charm or suggestion, than anything else; I would allow anti-charm magic to have a temporary or partial effect. Just enough for a few gargled words of exposition. "It's watching us right now! Look!" That sort of thing.
>But how do we actually position the false hydra where the players can find it with good play?
>One option is to make the hydra visible in mirrors. They might come across this solution relatively early in the investigation process. Arming the populace with hand mirrors is a solution (but also how many hand mirrors does a medieval town have, really?), and will probably stop the daytime predation. But the hydra will continue to eat people during the night, when there is no light to make the mirrors useful.
>Do cats see it? They probably freak out around it. Dogs have no idea, though.
Ryan Rodriguez
>A more interesting, but also more challenging option is to allow them to investigate strange occurrences. If the lamp lighter was eaten halfway through his task, the last lit lantern is a bit ominous. If a player slips on a blood spill, the PC will have to suffer through the cognitive dissonance of having to rationalize a huge, obvious piece of evidence, but the player is under no such compunction. They can investigate the nearby alley.
> Other options present themselves. They could figure out where the necks stand in the sky by triangulating with an ally on a different rooftop, by discovering which cloud patterns are obscured from each other (because the false hydra's neck occludes them). Bizarre ideas might work, like shooting arrows around randomly or constantly swinging a grappling hook around.
>If the grappling hook bangs into the false hydra, the psychic suppression will probably just force the PC to absentmindedly pick up the rope and resume swinging it, but a second PC watching the first PC would notice this irregularity, because that's another degree of separation from the hydra. The mind-song hides the hydra, not the irregular behavior of a fellow adventurer who swore to shout an alarm if the grappling hook hit something invisible.
>Baiting the hydra would also work well, and is probably the easiest method. While the hydra bites, it stops singing, making it visible again. (Or more accurately, allowing the PCs to stop ignoring it.)
>If it is wounded, it will probably retreat down to its subterranean lair. The PCs will have to kill it now, before they fall under the sway of its song, which it has now resumed (and the PCs can hear again, properly. It is a nightmarish howl.)
>If the PCs tarry, they'll forget they ever saw the false hydra. The fictive paranoia (and actual metagaming) will be rampant, but this is okay. Their left hand is just giving them more useful messages today, as more as more of the PC's brain rebels.
Dominic Johnson
Metastasis
>The PCs abandon the town to its fate. Or perhaps they just fail utterly at investigating this weirdness. Either way, the worst has come to pass.
>The false hydra doesn't just eat everyone and then die. That would be too easy. Things Get Worse.
>When a false hydra is mature (some texts localize this event to the day when it has grown seven heads) it begins to sing a new song. This song mentally enslaves everyone within hearing range. It's like a broadcast of dominate person.
>Yes, give the PCs a saving throw. But even if they make it, they're going to be in the middle of a town where everyone is trying to kill them. The colossal apparatus of the false hydra is now visible. Monstrous heads on tree-trunk necks tower above the town, leaning over rooftops and peering into windows. Its bellowing voices order its mindslaves to kill that man over there, or to capture the fleeing child over there. (Of course it can talk. It always could. It just never had anything to say.)
> Only when the town has been purged, the false hydra orders its servants to exhume its body, now grown swollen and fat. And while they dig, it eats.
>And then the false hydra orders that it should be transported to a new city, where there is new flesh to be eaten. It will be borne there atop the backs of its slaves, grateful legs staggering under its cold tonnage. When it gets too large to carry they will lash it with chains and drag it behind them like a wailing, blubbery siege engine. (Which it is.)
>Of course, this is unsustainable. As soon as a mindslave is outside the range of the false hydra's voice, they'll flee. (Unless they tamp some wax in their ears and return for their loved ones hahahahahaha.) Unless it raids other food stores, it will starve. It cannot farm or hunt sufficient food without spreading its servants across an unacceptably broad area.
Adrian Williams
>And the uncommon adulthood of false hydras is marked by desperate aggression. An animal convulsing as it dies, crushing people and cities under its hungry bulk. It usually heads for the largest cities (or whichever one the PCs have fled to) while seeking the largest food source. Sometimes it succeeds long enough to grow larger and move on to the next city. A tour of death.
>The "traditional" tactic is to set fire to the granaries and evacuate the city. The false hydra will starve to death in a few weeks, while everyone visits their relatives in the countryside. The false hydra's movements are tracked by scouts on horseback, who watch the abomination from the horizons and communicate by flags. Many of them choose to mutilate their own ear canals, in order to deafen themselves.
>These tactics failed spectacularly in the summer of 882 TFM, when there were multiple false hydras colluding with each other. (The exact number is still disputed.)
>A more pressing problem is bandits, preying on families traveling alone with all their wealth. Looters also linger in the cities after the evacuation order has been given, and many eventually fall victim to the false hydra, and allow it to grow larger. Assassinations and power struggles are also common, as different parties use the chaos to seize an advantage.
>And lastly, a military presence must ensure that no mercenary company, slavelord, or evil wizard is allowed to open up lines of communication with the false hydra (using messengers). Those avenues of exploitation have allowed some absolutely horrific tragedies in the past. The cancer must be isolated until it is forced to eat itself.
>If the game gets to this point and the PCs want to stay involved, I would turn the focus on the latent possibilities in the last four paragraphs, instead of assaulting the god-monster head-on. Because who wants to fight a false hydra at the height of it's power. (Lots of players, probably.)
Ryder Fisher
The end.
I like the idea, but the level of meta-gaming this GM suggests is way too much for me. Have you ever encountered a false hydra?
Adrian Hernandez
Did this years ago with my players as an aside from the ongoing campaign. Except mine was a psychic Mantid Monster that had been feeding on the town for over a decade, using the old mine shafts to get around.
The PCs got a letter from an old friend they couldn't remember, who wanted help finding his son. His kid had gone missing, along with several others.
The PCs arrived in a town that didn't know them, and vice versa. The old friend was gone and no one had even heard of him. The PCs spent a few sessions investigating the history of the town, learning about the staggering number of missing people and that they HAD been there before, but couldn't remember.
Eventually they tracked the monster through the mines and killed it.
They had gotten the reference early on and didn't tell me. So as a joke, they broke into a full blown ERP orgy right before the final fight.
Bentley Jenkins
No, but I used a Dead Hand before. Wasn't D&D.
Aaron Rogers
Part of the problem with using it is that either it requires a game where the False Hydra's song cannot be saved against or resisted somehow, or it requires the GM to simply ignore it which is basically GM fiat and thus removing the opportunity of the players to affect the outcome in any way.
In other words it's a nifty narrative creature but unless you prevent the players from actually acting like players they WILL attempt to derail your nifty horror narrative by killing the monster.
Hudson Morris
Awesome idea for anything other then a D&D game like the texts suggests doing.
Alexander Ortiz
No but that thing gave me nightmares as a kid E for everyone my ass
Leo Morales
IT?
Jack King
Yes. In the book, the kids decide to have a spontanious Orgy in the mine/sewer in order to strengthen their sense of togetherness...
Brayden Smith
It was the first King book I read. I was 12. It was a wierd introduction to adult books.
Levi Rodriguez
I literally just DMed one for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
Ask me anything.
Easton Parker
Did your players survive? If so, how? And how could you have prevented it?
Cameron Smith
2/3 survived the encounter. The third had to burn 2 fate points (he only gets 2 for the entirety of that character's life) in order to get out.
I threw them a bone halfway through the RP and allowed the empty peasant home they were searching to have a small magical mirror in the corner. They used the mirror to root it out of the cellar.
My intention was to let at least most of them survive the encounter but to punish them for mistakes they had made the last time we'd RPd.
They're going to be much more cautious going forward into the ruined province.
Anthony Reyes
I've never heard of this before, but it sounds fantastic. I just want to say that Veeky Forums has been great for this lately, first there were those wendigo apocalypse threads where user shared all of his knowledge on Wendigos, then this. It's inspiring stuff and you guys are awesome.
Robert Wilson
>wendigo apocalypse threads where user shared all of his knowledge on Wendigos Is that archived?
Ethan Miller
Yeah, I'd be interested in reading that too if it's still up somewhere.
This is a nice concept, but it sort of falls apart when introduced to bizarre races that I enjoy.
Like mushroom men. Or hovering crystals.
That won't stop me from using it, as the world is full of crazy mutated shit, but they're probably going to see through it and have to convince their more traditional meat-based party members of the danger.
>Dead hand >ReDead/Gibdos >Floormasters Fuck the Shadow Temple for teenage me's nightmares. Though Bongo-Bongo was kinda fun.
Isaac Rivera
I fail to see any reason that it shouldn't work on crystal people or mushroom people, unless they have distinct resistance to charms or compulsions.
Jose Sullivan
Well, at the very least, they're immune to people trying to eat them.
Not immune to being used as saltlick, but that's a different kind of threat. Adorable deer.
Landon Perez
False hydra starts strong but the end is stupid. Everything past the change from psychic repression to control is garbage, explaining the evil to such a degree ruins the fear
Isaac Rivera
Damn, that's a good read. Wish I hadn't missed those threads.
Austin Gutierrez
This is scary and all but I'm a bard sooooo
countersong
Also, the deaf and hard of hearing would be unaffected
Ryder Wilson
Idea for running this: when starting the session, play very low-key white noise, such that it's fades into the background. Whenever the hydras song would stop, turn it off
Kayden Jenkins
Inclined to agree. It'd be better if instead of gradually eating the whole town, it just became a normal, constant presence. Imagine a capital city with one of these things in it. Everyone else in the country is aware of this shit, but they don't even bother telling the locals anymore because nobody believes them.
Andrew Hall
Cool idea that is almost impossible to run correctly, like most horror.
