Welcome, if you thought that this is going to be a video about a silly D&D monster from the 1980's, yes and no? Even I was shocked at how deep this rabbit hole goes, so, lets go.
The Tween first appears in Dungeons and Dragons history within the pages of White Dwarf Magazine issue number 8, it was designed and submitted by Ian Waugh, Ian also created the infamous Pervert class for Dungeons & Dragons, published in White Dwarf 1, and also contributed to Owl & Weasel, Owl and Weasel was a newsletter for board gamers, role-playing gamers and wargamers, published in London, England, by Games Workshop. A total of 25 issues were published from February 1975 until April 1977; it was edited by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. It was superseded by White Dwarf magazine. To be perfectly honest, I never knew this newsletter existed until just now either, and now I desperately need to find and add all of them to my vast trove of knowledge. It launched initially to complement and advertise Games Workshop's original business of producing and selling hand-crafted wooden board games, most interesting is issue number six, dedicated entirely to the new game of Dungeons and Dragons. Can I get hold of every digital copy of a newletter published and sent out to only 200 people 50 years ago? Heh heh... Hold my mead!
Link in the description below the video to all 25 issues, enjoy!
The Tween as a concept is based on the writing of Clifford D. Simak, one of the classic pulp science fiction and fantasy writers my father had on his bookshelf when I was a child; Simak was a good friend to Isaac Asimov and generally well-regarded by everybody. Simak's stories often took place in rural settings with a more backwoods and common man protagonist and there is a dry sense of humor to the tales, he really stands out to me in his theory on time travel, being a proponent of the multiverse theory, just like Rick and Morty, one is not traveling to the past, as there is no such place, rather, one moves to a close parallel dimension, one in which events take place later, thus it seems like one has stepping into the past but its some alternate reality, not your past anymore. In his popular novel 'Time and Again', a traveler from Earth crashes on a planet; he is then nurtured by ethereal duplicates that seem to accompany every sentient being throughout life. These are the so-called Halflings (not those halflings) that form the core concept of the Tween for The 1981 Fiend Folio entry on page 91, though there is a bit of a difference between the description of the Tween in White Dwarf magazine and the Fiend Folio and also Simak had a similar incorporeal species of far future human-alien hybrids in his novel 'Highway of Eternity' and now I am left pondering which is closer to the Tween concept.
So, settle back, grab yourself a tasty beverage it's time to get deeply nerdy.
Oh you thought we were in the rabbit hole already? No no, I'm just getting started.
The following information is sourced mainly from Planescape and is the only official lore detailing where the mysterious and elusive Tween came from. Thousands of years ago a planar species called the Kyleen ruled a city-state in the concordant plane of the Outlands in the location where the Gate town called Xaos now stands, Outlands is the massive sort of disc world below the multiplanar nexus city of Sigil, regarded by many to be the center of the multiverse, if there is such a thing as a center. From this central hub of the multiverse, the Kyleen traveled throughout the multiverse as traders, explorers, and planeswalkers. Unfortunately, their downfall came when a great smith performed a grand experiment. He wanted to see if he could sculpt an entire palace out of a dangerously unstable, transmuting substance called Karach, made from the chaos stuff of the plane of Limbo itself. Not only did this not go as intended, transforming the entire edifice into something never seen before or since, but it also spawned a virulent and rapidly spreading infection called the Chaos plague which every single member of the Kyleen race became a victim of. Each victim slowly and painfully turned into an entirely new form of creature and eventually, every single one of them just vanished. We now know that the bulk of the population migrated to the timeless Astral plane, seeking to halt the progress of the chaotic mutation; these became the Devete species; those who sought a cure in the countless demiplanes of the Deep Ethereal plane were never heard from again (so scholar claim), and those who lingered in the Border Ethereal plane became the Tween species.
Does this sound familiar to you? If you know about the Spellweaver species and the god Jergal and the fall of the Netheril empire, you will see a striking similarity to the tactic the Spellweavers regularly employed to wipe out civilisations they considered a threat to their dominance over the multiverse that once was. Yes, that was speculation on my part, but, I thought it was interesting enough to share. I have some more speculation, a little more obscure, for fans of 4th edition lore and the origin of the Quom species, more on that later in the video.
It's difficult to know exactly what the original Kyleen species looked like, but the Devete stand around five feet tall, lean, with a wiry strength like the Githyanki, they have blue skin, and a long, thin tail like a lizard, they have large, haunting eyes, devoid of motivation, emotion or goals. The Tween when detected and not attached to a host, appear as a vague, misty humanoid silhouette that stands a rather stocky three feet tall, and if you could check the mass of both species, they would be about the same.
On the Ethereal plane, however, according to the more complete information in the Monstrous Compendium 14 Fiend Folio appendix, we get an exact description and an image of what the Tween actually look like, and they are not pretty. They appear as short, squat and ugly humanoids with stubby arms and legs, and no neck, their eyes, nose and ears are relatively tiny and their pale, blue/white skin is mottled and thick with knotted veins pulsing under the skin along their arms. The look a lot like the Sontarans from Dr Who, but even shorter and with more stubby arms and legs with fingers almost becoming vestigial and they may have piercings in strange places or tattoos of disturbing symbols, they tend to wear a loin cloth and thick belt around their midsection with overlapping skirt and a studded pauldron over one shoulder made from the hide of phase spiders, some also have one or two crystals inset into the belt which seem out of phase with reality, their purpose unclear. Odd streaks of darkness appear and sink under their skin as the weird energy they feed on is drawn into their body, this occurs when within six feet of the being they are bonded with, this energy seems to flow around and into them, then through and into the Tween, like they are using their host as some sort of collector and catalyst for their strange sustenance, almost like lines of magnetic force but more distorted and irregular, through this distortion, the pale, small glowing eyes of the Tween can see things which are most likely to occur within the next few seconds. See, they feed on Probability. More on that in a moment.
To beings on the Material plane, the Tween is a wraith-like being, more like a smoky outline, and can generally only be seen by anyone in 'phase' with it. Though its outline can be detected if viewed through smoked glass. After several hours with a host they gradually begin to assume the general shape and characteristics of that host, including their size, but, they will always remain a little more squat and stocky in their build.
Here's the other common factor between the Tween and the Devete, they only really display their own behavior and motivations when they gather in a group that is traveling together, unfortunately, they change from being neutral to becoming neutral evil, the worst kind of evil if you ask me, xenophobic and full of murderous malice toward any other intelligent beings they encounter and will attack and kill, the Devete have a particularly nasty bite and produce venom from a mouth full of fangs, the Tween never attack with a bite or claws, they use weapons which they carry with them and attack in a similar way to humanoid adventurers. When encountered alone, though, which is most of the time, the Devete will simply copy the behavior, even the motives of the being they observe closely. If you approach a Devete with the intent to harm it and steal from it, that is exactly how it approaches you, and if you sit and smell flowers and genuinely wish it love, peace, and happiness from a safe distance, that is also exactly how the Devete behaves, they are just.. blank until they encounter another intelligent being and start to emulate that being's behavior, even if an adventurer knows this, it requires a difficult wisdom test to really make oneself believe something strongly enough, and if they don't, well, the Devete will seem like its fallen for it, but now its manipulating the adventurer, the creatures emotional adaptation and mimicry is just too complete. Tweens go a step further; they actually bond with the intelligent being they lock their attention on. Like the Devete, Tween are telepathic, they can sense emotions to a more limited extent, but once they form their bond with another intelligent being, the most intelligent candidate they can find, they will not break that parasitic bond until either they are dead, or the host is, in which case, they will then undergo a literal traumatic split and become two Tween, the original and its duplicate offspring. The two will then go their own ways and seek out another victim to bond with, so, unless you want a plague of them, its best to kill the Tween and not the victims if one can manage it.
But why would you kill them, what is the nature of their bond and why do they do it?
Although they live permanently on the Ethereal plane, Tween are not undead, not even a little bit, they require nourishment and the chaos-plague mutation has provided a remarkable adaptation, not only are the omnivorous, able to eat a wide variaty of organic materials, they actually eat probability, don't ask me how, I don't know, its way outside biological or even arcane science, the effect in the Dungeons and Dragons game are fairly straightforward and easy to represent, particularly in 5th edition. Here is how it works, when they bond with an intelligent being on the prime material plane, they assume the general shape of that individual and always accompany them, staying within six feet and remaining in telepathic contact with them, appearing like a smoky or shadowy outline, once the bond is set, neither the host or the Tween can sever it voluntarily. While bonded, the Tween causes a disruption in reality which causes all luck to be in favor of its host, and all other beings within 50 feet will have bad luck, so, the host rolls every d20 roll with advantage and everyone else, friend or foe within 50 feet rolls with disadvantage. This doesn't trigger other abilities that rely on the host having advantage, like sneak attacks and so on, but it is a massive boon for the host, as you can imagine, this makes them a big problem if they happen to be traveling with a party of fellow adventurers, because unless their allies stay 50 feet away from them, they will roll dismally and quite often, this can be deadly. The host will have to deal with becoming an outcast, very much like the Tween do.
If the host gets killed, the Tween suffers a massive trauma of grief and loss; it literally splits into two individuals; the original will immediately set out to find a new host, and the new Tween will wander around in the Ethereal plane for a while, becoming more and more lonely and miserable. Although they don't have any natural enemies other than phase spiders, apparitions, and other undead and predatory species dwelling in the Border Ethereal, they don't have any allies either, no friends, no support, even other Tweens kind of hate and shun each other, there is almost nothing to eat and it constantly craves that sweet flow of probability, or luck, that it can only get when bonded to a host in the Material plane.
Physically, the Tween are not formidable creatures, they rely on weapons and poorly crafted protective gear that they scavenge or craft by hand, they are not strong or agile, but can keep up with their host and do have a psychic ability that manifests as Mage Hand used like a cantrip, they are not locked to their hosts actions and can fight and defend themselves independently, though they have low hit points and while they can see a few moments into the future, its not a huge tactical advantage other than a remarkable bonus to their Dexterity checks and things like dodging arrows and such.
Tween will rely heavily on their ethereal, non-corporeal defence and their influence on luck, but facing a foe on the Ethereal plane with them, they are far less confident, but unable to flee unless their host does.
So, that's the Tween for you, kind of a sad existence really.
Now, for the 4th edition fans, or those who cherry picked the few bits of good lore that came along, the story of the Dawn War and the callous destruction of the Goddess Lakal and the origin of the Quom is very interesting, I found the Quom one of the more original 4th edition species, and as I was researching the Tween, the Devete and the Kyleen, I thought, what if those Kyleen who fled into the deep Ethereal plane didn't just vanish, what if they created or perhaps found a living, divine demiplane and bonded with it completely? Well, that is the Quom!
For all the info on that species, check out my lore video on this channel and explore the depths of the rabbit hole with me.
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