Hydras should always be among the most dangerous monsters in a fantasy setting

Fantasy monsters should always have enormous variability.

I do. Hydras are criminally underused in fantasy.

Hydras are one of the most overrated monsters you can use in a fantasy game. They are boring as fuck to fight mostly because everyone and their mother knows what to do with them, but also because it's just chopping heads over and over.

can't you just reinvent the monster like it's done for all others?

Everybody knows how to deal with pretty much any fantasy monster at this point, that doesn't make them any less interesting as long as heroes don't always carry the perfect equipment/abilities to handle them properly.

So then you make them fun! Their whole concept is regrowth and injuries making them more dangerous, so you change how they express that. Maybe as you cut off heads, the subsequent heads get physically tougher and more powerful? Maybe hydras multi-headed forms are the cause of temporary magic, unleashed in bursts of swarming maws and twisting necks before withering away and falling to the ground, diminished? Maybe hydras don't regrow heads at all, but just progressively tougher and stronger the more heads are severed? There's tons of fun stuff you can do with them.

>>everyone and their mother knows what to do with them
>propose the only thing you shouldn't actually do

what did he mean by this?

Reverse hydra. Every time you cut off a head, it grows a new body.

I don't know about that. If you say, took some of the various MtG hydras and translated them into monsters, you'd wind up with some pretty different and dangerous hydras

>Hydra
>not SS
Quit shilling for more funding Red Skull, we know that Captain America beats you everytime.

>after a while you are fighting a mass of bodies interconnected by a very short neck, unable to move or do shit except rolling around smashing things with it's massive weight

As retarded as it sounds, that might actually work on a humorous campaign.

Hail Hydra.

I imagined each head grew a new body out of it, but your idea is more fun

More or less. There are always ways to make it work, though. It just becomes harder to justify is all.
Oh, fair enough. I read OP as "Hydras [where they exist]...".

>is literally canon that in D&D, Hydra are a Dragons most favorite food to the point where the very emission they Emmit are capable of attracting a dragon and they can be used as alchemical ingredients to act as dragon bait

lolno. Go read some Ecology of the hydra you fucking nolore pleb.

>literal gods can't beat them on their own
>Zeus, a literal God, killed the Titans on his own

Ok, guy.

I think he means that hitting the stump with a torch is either a free action or included in 'chop head.'
Though seriously, if you aren't Herakles himself, surviving the poisonous breath could well be even harder than killing the heads.

At that point it's not really a hydra, is it?

Tell me one situation where an intelligent adventurer doesn't have a blade and a torch.

You are still just chopping off heads, which gets boring really fast.

Well, there's a reason why he's the boss, "guy".

Actually, Zeus and all the Olympians, together with the freed Primordials, defeated the immortal Titans and threw them into Tartarus.

Do you even into Greek mythology?

No, why should there be universally fixed power rankings? No fictional thing has precedence over another fictional thing.

a hydra could feed a lot of people, depending on how the heads regenerate.

>At that point it's not really a hydra, is it?
Do you have a handbook on how fictional creatures should and shouldn't be? I might be misrepresenting dragons in one of my campaigns and I don't want someone from the government knocking on my door to revoke my DMing license.

Wait a moment, I have a question from outside. How and why does a Primordial even fight? I remember Gaia being pissed off after the Titanomachy and even then she didn't fight personally. How is Tartaros imprisoned, being the prison for Uranos' children? Or did you just mean Hecatoncheires and stuff and say Primordials?...
I'm just confused, sorry.

>Cutting off a hydra's head makes it grow more heads.
>Not having it so when you cut off a head, the head grows a new body and attacks you.

Come on guys.

>one situation where an intelligent adventurer doesn't have a blade and a torch
And the ability to wrestle a gigantic beast, the strength to cleanly cut a neck and the skill to quickly burn the cut? Anything that's not Hercules-level of power is unprepared for such a situation

not always, i.e in a seting where there are many hydra subspecies it could be feasible for smaller types to exist, much like there are both big and small snakes

but it does seem fitting to keep one of the OG mythological monsters relevant

Honestly MaRo's shilling of Hydras as Green's "iconic" big creature type (they're not and never will be) has just made me hate the species as a whole.

I remember Hydras were pretty deadly in the Avernum games, mostly because multiple attacks were OP. They weren't any harder to kill than any other monster, but if you let them spend a whole turn in Melee range with any of your characters, you could more or less expect them to be bitten to death.

Granted, there were a lot of monsters that could fuck you up with multi-attacks.

The Hecatoncheires are usually lumped in with the proper Primordials since they preceded the Olympians. Sloppy, but there it is.

So that was it. I want somebody to rewrite the Theogony and bring order to that. Thank you!

>preceded the Titans
fixed

Not at all, the Titans were born first and the Cyclopes and the Hecatoncheires after.

Why should the source be written to accommodate a sloppy modernism? Do not even joke about such a thing.

What if you fought a really young hydra that was only about as big as a building? Or as big as a toolshed?

Any updates?

slime-dra?

The original hydra was only about as big as a toolshed. Cadmus' dragon, too.

More like a sly-dra, because you don't expect it.

What a hyly intelligent pun.

Well shucks buster, now I look the fool

Yes. They should be the ur-apex predator among monsters that still need a physical form to be dangerous, and do not have divine/infernal heredity. Who are you quoting though, OP?

Nah. It just means you have a good sense of the ancient.

If you interpret the painting literally, sure. But Homeric Greeks haven't discovered perspective in their art yet, so everything is man-sized.

Well, we then to just use a light spell, the wizard kept some fire spells on hand for trolls, but enough to stop á mutilated , not so sure.

I'm pretty sure they understood what perspective was, but they wanted detail on the human and wouldn't make a pot big enough for a good scale.

There are multiple generations of Divine beings in Greek mythology.

The Protogenoi (Chaos, Gaia (Earth), Uranus (Sky), Pontus (Sea), Ourea (Mountains), Tartarus (Underworld), Erebus (Darkness), Aether (Light), Nyx (Night) and Hemera (Day)) were all part of the first generation of divinities.

The Titans were the second generation divinities led by Cronus and overthrew Uranus. The Hecatonchires and Cyclopes were part of this generation but were not Titans.

The Gods were the third generation of divinities led by Zeus who overthrew Cronus.

A forth generation of divinities, the Gigantes (Giants), tried to overthrow the Gods but failed.

None of their art at that period reflects it so I'll stand by what I already know and said

His hand goes around its neck. Not a matter of perspective.

You have to provide evidence that the hydra was unusually-sized, not the other way around.

Things too big to fit on pots didn't go on pots, that's all.

>For his second labour Herakles was instructed to slay the Lernaian (Lernaean) Hydra. The beast was nurtured in the marshes of Lerna, from where she would go out onto the flatland to raid flocks and ruin the land. The Hydra was of enormous size, with eight mortal heads, and a ninth one in the middle that was immortal.

I'm not sure you even know what you're trying to argue. When all depictions are anthropocentric, that is a lack of perspective.

That assumes it's in my interest to convince you by spoonfeeding what I already take as granted. Hesiod would be a start. Do what you want.

>None of their art at that period reflects it
You should probably check out the Exekias amphora, c. 530/525 BC. Pretty clear use of perspective as a concept if not as an advanced technique.

Why are weapons at scale then ?

How? It still adheres to the pattern that man-sized figure is the largest object inside the frame. It takes centuries before man starts getting bored of man-sized views.

Because they were fashioned by man, the same cohort the painter belongs to. I'm not quite confident the people responding firmly understand what is being referred to as perspective. Eh. I've had enough. As you were.

If the criteria you're using is that a man-sized figure is the largest object inside the frame, check out the Dionysus Cup, c. 530 BC. Largest object in frame is the ship, by far.

Don't blame others if you want to use a colloquially common word in a strict technical sense without outlining that strict technical sense in advance.

I've surmised you're using scale as a proxy for perspective. I'll not argue.

A snake the size of a toolshed is an enormous snake.

Do you often find yourself examining the world from the perspective of a ship?

You used the perspective to justify a matter of scale. I thought it better to humour you and assume you meant scale.

So let's assume I'm in the wrong, here. How does the early Greek anthropocentric perspective justify your contention that the hydra was actually much bigger than it's comparative size in depictions?

Is no one going to mention that Heracles knocked off the hydras heads with a club and Iolaos burned the neck stumps with torches?

If the hydra was much bigger than a toolshed I'm pretty sure the fires used to put them out would be categorized as something other than torches. Flaming trees, perhaps.

Iolaus was a puny mortal. He wouldn't have been able to lift a flaming tree of the size you're thinking.

I do not agree. I think trying to make up "rules" like that is a bit stupid because of how arbitrary it is. And you just keep piling on such rules, because if one person gets to make such a rule every one will want to, you are going to end up with all setting being the same mess of a fantasy kitchen sink.

There's already a contradictory account posted prior, you've proven you can make that leap. I'm more interested in extracting my loaves from the oven. Have fun.

WelI can't speak for the size of the hydra. I will say the Ismenian dragon (pictured here looking kind of puny) is described by Seneca as being taller than pines and oaks, and by Ovid as being large enough to smash trees aside as it advances. So I think the other guy is right at least on the point of art being misleading.

Why do I feel like I'm conversing with a bot through several layers of machine translation? Be a human and have a decent conversation.

If you are battling through a language not your own upon which you don't have a firm grasp, why not accept and admit that rather than letting misunderstanding stack upon misunderstanding until giving up or losing interest?

That's... that's the point, yes.

I thought this was going to be thinly-veiled tarrasque bashing thread but there's no mention of it and you autists are distracted by shallow language games.

What if hydras are to the gods what viruses are to humans?

Yes, that's probably why I was agreeing with them.

You want to be entertained and I want to be entertained, turns out neither of us find the other entertaining. Who would have thunk in a make-believe board

ITT: Two neckbeards expect amusement from one another. Hilarity for everyone else ensues.

There are 300 years and more between that depiction and those accounts. Accounts are known to inflate over time, what makes the user's art preference theory more probable than "in 300 hundred years they made the monster really big because it's cool"?

The perspectivefag sounds more a hipster douche type with the hints at an art history definition. Spot on about the other guy being a typical neckbeard.

wow, painful samefagging

Primordial's have their own families and loved ones but they're so powerful that they never risk actually fighting each other. They're essentially the MAD scenario of antiquity. Tartarus is both a place and a being, simply being the personification of that dark place people go when they die, as opposed to the Darkness of Night, Nyx, and just plain Darkness, Erebus.

One time Hera tricked Hypnos, son of Nyx and Erebus, into putting Zeus to sleep as part of a challenge against his powers. During this sleep Hera put Heracles into the rage in which he killed his family. When Zeus awoke he was furious and was going to kill Hypnos but the God of Sleep fled to his mother's house in the Underworld. Zeus rode there on the wind but was greeted at the door by The Goddess of the Night herself

Zeus backed the fuck down.

This the part where I'm supposed to post my screencap to defend my online honor, then you respond with shoop or some other contrivance. Shan't do it.

Even accounting for inflation, I doubt the original Greeks had in mind a dragon the size of a largeish dog when discussing the exploits of a great hero.

Those silly Homeric Greeks, when will they get with the times?

If a Hydra's heads keep growing back why does nobody try stabbing it the heart?

To the ancients, a dragon was just a serpent. A snake the size of a large dog with nine heads is still a pretty major thing to defeat with a spear.

Because of all the heads.

In 3.5 a Hydra, and especially a cryohydra, could be jobbed by a single fireball spell if the damage rolled high enough, because the AoE kills all the heads at once, which kills the beast.

Pyrohydras are another matter but there is was a metamagic feat that let casters swap out any damage type for a single damage type chosen when taking the feat, at no spell level increase. Set that to frost damage and you're good to kill any Hydra as soon as you learn fireball.

So how does an hydra works

you cut one head, two more grows

or you cut one head, and one head grows?

>I doubt the original Greeks had in mind a dragon the size of a largeish dog when discussing the exploits of a great hero

I' talking about the Ismenian dragon. It was just a regular serpent with one head and hence you'd expect it to be pretty big to merit talking about.

Hydras get stronger with every head you chop off, the setting's dragons are hydras with just one head left making them incredibly strong, they still keep scarred stumps around their neck

I don't really get why cutting heads isn't a valid way to deal with an hydra, there has to be a point where there's so many heads the creature can't even move properly and it's own labyrinth of necks is so entangled it strangles itself

But that aside, why would anybody run to cut a monster's head oof isntead of the most obvious stab to the heart that works on pretty much anything that has a heart?

One head and as big as a great dane is still a fucking huge snake and a good story in my book. Maybe you're right, it needs a little polishing... I know! I planted its teeth like seeds and warriors sprung out! You guys are all earthborn dragon warriors, guys! We so much cooler than those dirty Spartans... what is Lacedaemon, decended from Zeus or some shit? Fucking LAME, seen that shit a hundred times.