REF: Old McHydra had a Farm

I'm trying to keep the posting momentum going. so now it's time for some randomized encounter hijinks! For this entry, I chose the wilderness tables and randomly picked the terrain type and got "Inhabited." For creature type, the dice sent me to the Dragon subtable (eek!) and we ended up with an eight-headed Hydra!

Now, the term inhabited can mean a lot of different things. As this is a "wilderness" encounter, I chose not to go with an actual village or town. I decided I liked the idea of open farmland. Still rural, but with a population around. Now, if we're basing things on a medieval style world, a lot of farming lands were surrounded by much denser wilderness. People worked fields that had been cleared from deep forests and the like. 

So in this scenario, rather than the hydra just roaming around open ground stomping farmhouses "Dunwich Horror" style, I'm imagining that it originated from a deeper, darker part of the adjacent forest. Perhaps it had hatched there some time ago and had been growing in size. At first, the young creature could find enough to eat on the smaller animals that lived in the woods with it: birds, rabbits, maybe even the occasional deer. Now, however, it has grown too large and its appetite too great for such fare. The scent of nearby livestock has drawn it out of concealment.

Maybe traveling PCs are sleeping in a farm's hayloft one night when it attacks the barn, seeking a fat cow for dinner. Or maybe the party is traveling on horseback when the hydra charges out of the trees after one of their mounts. This could lead to a fast one-and-done encounter with the creature, or it could lead the party to a more involved adventure. How did the hydra come to be in the woods when the locals had never seen one around those parts before? Maybe, somewhere deep in the trees there is the body of some adventurous type who had acquired the egg but died in the wilderness. The hydra has treasure type B, so perhaps the loot is on the body? Tracking it back to its lair could be profitable.

The Mythos: Canon or suggestion?

One of the risks of working with a licensed RPG or setting is the idea that the source material is the final measure of things. In other words, your stories, etc. need to match with what was put down before. You can't put the Shire next to Mordor or give dwarves bazookas and still call it Middle Earth.

Lovecraft is interesting in this regard because despite all the stories, entities, and monsters the whole idea is that people don't know these things' true natures. It gives you a fun springboard to start from.

While I am working with several ideas based on actual "official" creatures for the campaign, I do think I will be homebrewing a few things as well. Another issue with licensed/derivative games is that the players may be quite knowledgeable about "the lore." While good players will avoid metagaming, an obvious tell as to what their dealing with might wreck the suspense.

[I'm deliberately avoiding spoilers here, as a potential player or two might stumble along these posts.]

RSA: Contact Other Plane

Despite its power, it's easy to see why this spell might not be first on everyone's list. As a 5th level spell, it's competing for attention against such favorites as Cloudkill, Telekinesis, and Teleport. Unlike many other D&D spells, it has no guarantee of working, in that the entities contacted may either A) not know the answer, or B) just plain lie about it. Lastly, there is a decent chance of the MU going bonkers if he tries for the "higher" planes. 

Not quite as bad as this, but still...

There are several interesting things about this spell. First off, the planes are numbered "3rd-12th" in the spell description, with no real mention about what the sequence refers to.  I assume the 1st & 2nd are the material and the ethereal planes, respectively. DMs are expected to assign the others as they see fit, I expect. Personally, I approve. I'd hate to shoehorn a cosmology into my game that doesn't fit for the sake of one spell.

Secondly, the idea that the wizard can push this spell as far as he wants, choosing the plane he tries to reach. Want to play it safe and just ask on the 3rd plane? Go ahead. You won't get to ask as many questions, but you'll probably keep your marbles, and whatever picks up the phone is less likely to lie. They are also less likely to know the answer to begin with, however. If you kick it up a notch, the risk/reward goes up too. I love this kind of thing, where the player has to weigh their choices. 

I also love that the DM can feed the players false info. I'm not trying to screw over the PCs, but it's sort of what you'd expect from some extraplanar being that got the equivalent of an annoying phone survey call right at dinner. While the lying could take the form of the entity claiming ignorance, the opportunity for mischievous misinformation here is more than I could resist. 

Last, but not least, almost like it's straight out of Lovecraft, is the insanity factor. The idea that the caster could just go gaga with NO save is pretty impressive. Granted, the insanity is temporary, but the wording also states he is "out of the campaign." In other words, this isn't a case of slight anxiety, this fella is wigged out and no use at all on an adventure.

"Abracad-BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

It sort of makes you wonder what the wizard wants to know THAT badly. The answer is usually 'nothing' so the players never use the spell. While it is tempting to drop a scroll or spellbook containing CoP into the loot to see what the party does with it, I think this is the kind of spell that would need to be used multiple times before all the different wrinkles it presents could be explored.