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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rechan" data-source="post: 4812052" data-attributes="member: 54846">As far as "Making them seem alien"? Well, a lot of things in D&D should feel alien. The motivations of the Fey. The mindset of dragons. The schemes of a lich. The mechanization of a god. But when it comes down to it, it's very hard to pull off "A mere mortal/human cannot understand/fathom it", when obviously we can since a human came up with the idea and humans are playing in the game with it. The way to make something feel really alien:1) Give it a different mindset. It simply lacks something that we take for granted - morals, universal concepts like love/greed/honor, acknowledgment of sentience or souls, good or evil, etc. And unlike many popular culture robots/AI/aliens, the entity doesn't care that it lacks this understanding. 2) The Unknown. Leaving some things simply Unexplained can really make you feel off and disturbed and unsure. 3) Different physiology/architecture. An Escher painting is a good example. A beholder's lair, for instance, is completely 3D because it can fly - so you can have tunnels that are in the ceiling going between different levels, or ones slanted at a 70 degree angle. Or organic walls, with doors that are orifices. A room filled with slime that can be breathed. Make it gross and organic, and it will feel weird. 4) Random chaoticness. This sort of plays back to #2. It doesn't make sense because it's not meant to - for instance, a cult collecting bent pennies or all left-handed tools. A mist that just does something different to each person it encounters. This also applies to something like physics - when something reacts in a way that you don't expect it to, when it should? That's alien. 5) The threat of conversion. It's one thing to be enslaved or eaten by the monster. But imagine being transformed into that monster. Or being made into Something Else. Entities exposed to aboleth slime become amphibian, with a jelly-like skin. Illithids implant tadpoles into the brain of humanoids; that's how they breed. Parasitic creatures that take over the host, or use the host as an incubator ("Aliens" xenomorphs, Slaad).</blockquote>

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