In the vast expanse of the multiverse, the encounters between great cosmic beings are as rare as the stars in the night sky. They traverse the dimensional boundaries and space, their rules and powers vastly different from those of mortal creatures. Yet, even these mighty beings have their limitations, with one exception-the enigmatic Great Old Ones.
The Immortals, free to roam the realms, demiplanes, and dimensions, are a mystery to mortal kind. They patrol their assigned sections of space, occasionally venturing into the Ethereal or Astral plane to traverse the cosmos at unimaginable speeds. Their presence is rarely witnessed, appearing as fleeting shooting stars, their vaguely humanoid forms a blur to mortal eyes.
There are very few places that pose any sort of difficulty for the immortals to travel to or from. Even becoming two-dimensional is a weird but not impossible experience, but should the immortal try to access higher-dimensional space, they will always encounter the vortex.
The vortex was created by the Great Old Ones; I am not going to confuse the matter by saying when they did this; such a term makes no sense when you look at the fractured, often rebooted, and twisted nature of true time in the cosmos, suffice to say, the vortex is always there, even if one attempts to approach the beginning of time, in which case, the Slaadi god Ygorl is the supreme power that you have to be very very polite towards to either enter that zone or ever leave it. Ygorl makes no sense when asked about the vortex, Ygorl has no answers for you, and neither does Pale Night, the Lady of Pain, or any of the truly ancient powers; they rarely, if ever, communicate anyway, perhaps the cosmos that exists now is so alien to them, they no longer bother to make sense of it at all, so why communicate with anything in it?
Some of the greater powers do make use of some of the architecture left behind by the Great Old Ones, the vast elemental powers, and the first primordials or the outer planes, the words of power, the Mephits, the symbols in some diabolic circles, and the runes are linked to these vast threads of energy and effect, the very domains that the gods bicker over for control are remnants of the first thoughts and concepts that sprang from the alien minds of the Great Old Ones, like notes in a song, if you ask priests of the gods of knowledge, particularly the God Denier, the entire lattice of creation is one vast song, the harmonic scales are the different dimensions or planes, which is exactly why arcanists make use of special tuning forks, to chime a specific frequency, a sound, a color or something that resonates in some way, perfectly on that tone, which gives their spells and rituals the power to alter reality or leave it altogether for another reality or parallel dimension.
Beyond the great Vortex dwell the Great Old Ones, and none can venture into those higher dimensions to learn what exactly it is they are doing there, the only thing we can know is that access to those dimensions would give far greater freedom to move around the multiverse and provide much greater awareness, connection and control over all planes of existence, all parallel dimensions, in a weird way, its safe to say that the Great Old Ones at both removed from all of us, and so intimately connected to us all, that everything we do, is their actions, on a much vaster and deeper level, and all we do, say and think are merely the echoes, the ripples on the surface. Our reality is nothing more than their dreams and figments of their imagination.
To put this more clearly, and sorry to break it to you, but our reality is no more solid than a thought, and at any moment, it could all vanish into the exact nothing from which it came.
This is the great horror that underlies all deep mysticism. The closer one comes to a real understanding of power and the way the cosmos works, the more this becomes revealed.
I know these are disturbing thoughts, enough to drive many beings quite insane.
Speaking of insanity, many mortal beings persist in trying to reach the attention of the Great Old Ones, thinking that vast power could be theirs for the taking if only they could somehow find a loophole, a back door, or some method to identify and follow the cords and tones of the lattice of reality back to their source and somehow create a breach in which the Great Old Ones can escape.
See, most of these nutjobs think that the Great Old Ones were imprisoned behind the Vortex, that somehow the gods created this barrier to save reality or stabilize reality, trapping the Great Old Ones in a slumber were they dream the same dream, the one in which we all exist, over and over again. This is nonsense of course, no god is powerful enough to make a barrier like that, and it is us who are imprisoned, not the other way around, but, every now and then, these insane gaggles of robed and wretched cultists actually manage to do it, and the attention or influence of a Great Old One is oh so briefly gained, to the inevitable utter disaster and ruin of everyone and everything involved.
But they still try, no matter how many of their cursed grimoires are confiscated and destroyed. Even as I tell you this, some lich is feverishly pouring its boney fingertips over some eldritch Necronomicon, convinced they are on the cusp of godlike power.
Oh, there are ways in which such power can be accessed; there are plenty of Warlocks who have managed to form pacts with vast beings of the far realms, all too ready to call themselves great old ones, but such beings are usually greatly exaggerating their importance and concealing their true nature and intentions.
Those who witness some cult who actually manage to make contact with a real Great Old One will invariably report the same sorts of phenomina, one of which I am here to talk about today.
When some portal opens very close to the Great Vortex, swarms of these creatures called Dorreqi are almost inevitably bound to appear. They are kind of like the Blowflies of that realm, buzzing through an open window, erratic, annoying, evil little scum bags that are difficult to control and deal with, best just exterminated as efficiently as possible.
What is their purpose? I don't know, they are just there and unfortunately, they can exist in our reality quite easily, though it is very alien to them I imagine.
The Dorreq comes to us from the pages of the Tome of Beasts from Kobold Press; they fill a great niche as nasty but relatively straightforward aberration minions of medium size and a reasonably low challenge rating of 4, so they hit that sweet spot where you can pitch a few against a low-level party or a swarm of them against more formidable player characters, combining well with several other creatures, the Grick being a great example.
Dorreqi appear out of nowhere, from a seeming nightmare void of shattered space they materialize and fly through at a relatively slow speed of 20 feet per round, gravitating to any surface they can adhere their weirdly twitching tentacles to, they are relatively flat, like a flying starfish with irregularly sized tentacles for arms, at least eight of them, sometimes more, they don't have spines, hooks or suckers, but they do have a vicious beak like a squid, however, when you do catch a good look at their underside, its pure nightmare, as they seem to have a very ugly and distorted humanoid face, with two black eyes and a bulbous and wide nose with nostrils leaking noxious slime, their squid beak seems to thrust violently out of their mouth and the lips are raw and split around it, almost gangrenous. They tend to hover up quite high or slither up walls and pillars to cling to the ceiling, as they prefer to drop down on victims which they attack randomly and viciously.
Dorreqi do tend to attack any creature that is in any way involved in the breach that summoned them so they are, ostensibly, some sort of guardians, but its more organic than that, they are essentially part of the immune system of the Elder beings, a macro-organism, performing the same role as a micro-organism. But, they are far from mindless attack cells, they have the same capacity for intelligence that an average human does, though they have none of the same sort of experiences or conditioning from our reality so, aside from the terrible drone of void speech, they have no way to communicate other than violence and sabotage. They are also wickedly cruel creatures that delight in confounding and tormenting victims, driving them to the point of exhaustion before swarming over them, snaring them with their tentacles and then tearing them apart. They also have a strange ability to warp through solid stone or even sandy ground, similar to the way fey creatures can sometimes step from one tree to another, they use this a lot when moving around because doing so grants them 30 feet of movement per round, rather than their slower flight or climbing along surfaces at 15 feet per round.
When they do pop out of solid material, pay attention to the +8 bonus they have to Stealth checks and this movement method should afford them a saving throw to avoid damaging area effects as they vanish and appear nearby. They also have innate spellcasting, able to cast Blink, Dimension door, haste or Shatter.
Interestingly, the Dorreq shown in the Tome of Beasts on the D&D Beyond website is slightly different from the print version I have in my printed book; overall, what we have here is an improvement, but I do question turning the Stone Step ability into a bonus action rather than having it as an alternative to the creatures normal movement for the round.
Bonus actions are confusing and this is a pointless alteration that I don't think improved the creature at all, in fact, it just makes its movement capability a bit ridiculous, so, feel free to change it back to using Stone Step in place of normal movement for the round, not as a bonus action, its not dashing through solid rock, that is silly.
So, what do we have here?
Armor class of 15, 93 hit points and +6 dexterity bonus, resistant to Acid, Cold and Lightning damage and a couple of nasty proximity effects caused by its reality warping nature.
The area around the dorreq is warped by its connection to the Void. A creature that starts its turn within 20 feet of the dorreq must succeed on a DC 14 Strength saving throw or its speed is halved until the start of its next turn. Also we have a power called Void Thrum, rechargable on a roll of 5 or 6, The dorreq emits a barely audible, vibrating thrum laced with Void energy. Each creature within 20 feet of the dorreq must make a DC 14 Constitution saving throw, taking 3d6 thunder damage and 3d6 necrotic damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. This should have been Psychic damage in my opinion, but the necrotic damage does make sense.
On its turn the Dorreq can make one bite and two tentacle attacks, they are both +6 to hit, the tentacles have a reach of 10 feet, which is a significant tactical advantage, the bite inflicts 2d8+4 piercing damage, the tentacles do 1d8+4 bludgeoning damage each, nd if the target is a Medium or smaller creature, it is grappled (escape DC 14) and pulled up to 5 feet closer to the dorreq. Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained. The dorreq can grapple up to two creatures at a time and has a tremendous strength of 19, so, its perfectly reasonable that a Dorreqi could just throw a grappled victim using up one of its tentacle attacks that round to do so. With a strength of 19, it will toss an average medium sized adventurer 19 feet and do around 4d6 damage with the victim landing prone. It should be an option I think, feel free to modify your monsters, no two of them should be exactly the same.
One thing you may want to consider is that the corpses of the Dorreqi are interdimensional toxic waste that can be nearly as dangerous as demonic contamination, they will cause mutations in creatures exposed to their putrification and dispersal into the environment unless someone takes steps to dispose of them completely, the use of magical disintegration is ideal for this, but, throwing them through portals into voids or loading extradimensional storage containers with them and then locking those containers away forever is another good option, otherwise you are going to end up with all sorts of problems cropping up over time. These things have no place in civilized reality.
That being said, those wizards who are responsible for the likes of Owlbears and Howler Wasps will pay pretty good coin to the unethical adventurers who bring them such abominable treasures. But we really must avoid enabling those lunatics, honestly, the ownbears turned out ok, but those Howler wasps that the wizard Otiluke created are a bloody nightmare that should be exterminated completely.
That is a tale for another time, for now, my name is AJ Pickett, as always, thanks for listening and I shall be back with more for you, very soon.
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