Evil Pseudo Natural Monsters

[BlackJaw]

[ANDREW SWAN: STOP READING RIGHT NOW!]

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I've been working on a "evil from beyond our understanding" story line for my setting, and among other things I've been working with the "pseudonatural" template (Far realm and Alienist refrence there)

Some fun creature I've come up with that work well as Alien creature from another realm that normaly look like an impossible tangle of bones, tenticles, eyes, and mouths:

Psionic Puppeteer (Psionics Handbook): It's tiny slug like creature that takes control of it's host. Great Plot device and usable at low levels because it's only a little Vermin with almost no Hit Dice (1 hp) and CR of 1.

Bog Hag (Oriental Adventures): A shapechanger that must steal and wear the skin of another to look human. Weak monster, but great for minor minions that can look like average people in the world. Just imagine one leaving a skin... a mass of tendrils and eye stalks bursting from the skin and leaving it like an empty sack.

Greater Doppelganger (Monsters of Faerun): A shapechanger that eats the brains of another and steals their form and thoughts... yah, that works for me.

Ethereal Marauder: It lunges out of thin air and looks freaky even before the template.

Rast: Teeth, claws, blood drain, paralyzing gaze, and it flies about without wings... yah just right for being turned into a mass of tenticles.

Carrion Crawler:
Big, uggly, Tentacles.

Aboleth: Mucas attack and Tentacles with transformation powers.

 

[Kamard]

Gricks, mind flayers (especially mind flayers- they are tiny Cthulhu's!) beholders aren't too bad, chuul...

monsters from monsters of faerun like the malaugrym, greater doppleganger, sharn, phaerimm..

From Dragon magazine, several monsters over the months were pretty good, like the rotripper or the rogue eidolon.

If you have Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, clerics with the Insanity domain might be pretty good.

I have given a lot of thought to a world like this and would be interested in what you are doing and where you are going with this.

 

[BlackJaw]

[REMEBER ANDREW: NO READING]

Mindflayers of course. <evil grin>

Ok, my setting is a Modern version of a Fantasy World. Guns, Cars, Jet Fighters, Magic & Technology working togeather in massive Government funeded Secret Projects... Oh and this setting is a modernized D&D world, not magic added to our world, which makes a diffrence in a number of ways... I got 160 pages of setting written up for my players (so it doesn't have any hidden parts in it) on the topic. most of it needs to be rewritten and much of it should just get cut out.

Anyways, my players are currently 2nd level and just getting into the start of the plot.

In which an evil Scientist character is trying to release and an evil entity. Not an evil god, but something worse. It needs no worshipers, and grants no spells, but can destroy worlds. And it wants to destroy ours.

I have a whole storyline for it, but the evil scientist does a few things:
1) He's already discovered this evil entity, been driven slightly mad by it, and is under its power.
2) He's learned to use magic-tech portals to open doors to it's alternate and alien realties (call it far realm if you like). The evil entity can not use them yet because its form does not function in our world, but it has broken of parts of itself and sent them through the doors... the PseudoNatural creatures.
3) He's tried to alter his own genetic and magical Aura form to serve as a host form for the entity, but discovered humans are not suitable for it.
4) He's begun using Pseudonatural creatures to look for ways to make a host suitable for the big evil. The little buggers have taken over key officials in the military R&D, and have all the key members of his Xelthir Corp (a military contractor that works in magic-tech designs) under domination.

Events that will happen:
1) He will discover the strange magic alterations that happened to an Orc warlord... one that was made into a vampire through a wish spell (from a pit fiend) and then made into a half-fiend vampire (by killing and drinking the blood of that pit-fiend)
2) He will find in the wastes that once was the orc industrial kingdom (blasted into dust by magical nukes) a secret project using Demon-tech to form a Nuclear Powred Cyborg beast.
3) He will gain knowledge of the mutable factors of Elves, especialy the new wood elve nature shaped magic.
4) He will turn a wood elf into a host creature... at first something like a were-kraken, but latter into somethign more like a Godzila... then Cuthulu systle. (at this point the PC will have killed the evil scientist... but his elf subject will continue to transform)

I then have plans for it to destroy the world, leaving the PCs the lone survivors, landed in a new prime world. (now at high level in a world where they are the only ones with semi-automatic firearms) Maybe Planescape.

They will of course went revenge for the death of their world... and will have a hell of a face off once they get that powerful.

Here at second level they already have hints of the evils that Xelthir Corp is willing to do, although they don't know even half of it yet. They are also about to come across their first Puppeteer. They probably won't notice it at first because the nearby wood elves, and Dwarven Barbarian Terrorists, will be too distracting.

I intend for the evil scientist to either be an Alienist Cleric (alienist class doesn't specify Arcane magic and is valid as a cleric... The insanity domain with the madness domain maybe?) or a non-spellcaster (just lots of NPC expert levels and some Cthulu d20 like magic/insanity).

The Wood elf that will eventualy become the host, is currently an enemy of the PCs (they are about to meet him actualy) and will latter be a competitor.

 

[kaboom]

This sounds SUPER COOL

 

[BlackJaw]

Well it was cool. 3 of the characters died to terrorists, and the other 2 were disabled to the point of near death.

I decided not to end the setting, but the group is now the property of Xelthir Corp. (they will awake to find they have been raised at great expense by the company, and are now answer to the head of Human Resources.)

This gives me direct control over their next adventure... which will be a drop into the demolished orc-industrail city turned blasted undead complex. By "Drop" I mean the area is so blasted with a disintgrate effect that everything is dust like. You couldn't land a plane, and its to far and dangerous to travel by land... so they are being dropped out of a perfectly good transport plane with a group of feather fall rings. They will stuck in this undead infested city for a good month as they help Xelthir Corp setup a research facitly there. That facility will eventualy unearth a massive Demon-tech complex, and very nasty cyborg-troll that goes ape . Did I mention it was Nuke powered?