Wednesday, March 3, 2021

D20x5 Mischievous Mimics

Invasive thoughts? Sure I get invasive thoughts. Gonna invade the walls of this place and take the fight to the Hum. Right after this post.

Press button for mimic, unless the button is the mimic then you're fucked:


D20This mimic is currently disguised as 
1 a chest.
2 a ladle.
3 a gemstone.
4 a stack of firewood.
5 an altar.
6 a cauldron.
7 a shield.
8 a chess set.
9 a banner.
10 a bed.
11 an easel.
12 a grandfather clock.
13 a whiskey barrel.
14 a bag of flour.
15 a bonsai tree.
16 a hookah.
17 an illuminated manuscript.
18 a desk.
19 a lamp.
20a coat rack.

D20This mimic tends to kill by 
1 envelopment and suffocation.
2 death of a thousand cuts from a thousand sharp tendrils.
3 vomiting corrosive effluvia.
4 toppling and crushing with its deceptively heavy weight.
5 trampling beneath roller-feet.
6 mastication in a massive mouth.
7 punching with enormous fists.
8 throttling with a thrown tendril.
9 explosive projection of spear-like growths.
10 spitting poisoned needles.
11 whirling around with bladed appendages like a blender mixed with the Tasmanian Devil.
12 rapidly abrading its prey in a flowing sandpaper tide.
13 infiltrating preys’ nose/mouth/eye/etc. and ripping them apart from within.
14 turning into a fan and sucking prey in to get chopped up by its blades.
15 expanding until its prey are squashed against a wall.
16 exuding paralytic slime that works from the extremities inwards, becoming lethal once it reaches the heart and lungs.
17 means that don’t leave an obvious mark, so that it may pose its prey in tableaux to makes its disguises more convincing.
18 luring people into environmental hazards, perhaps with a sudden helpful shove.
19 copying other creatures’ natural weapons.
20chucking stones at high velocities, using its own elastic body as an oversized slingshot.

D20This mimic’s true form is 
1 the angler-esque feeding appendage of an extradimensional leviathan.
2 a tsukogami who forgot what sort of object they used to be.
3 a magically-enhanced mimic octopus.
4 a glitch in reality that the universe can’t decide on whether it’s a living creature or an inanimate object.
5 a figment escaped from the world of dreams, an inchoate background character used for things that dreamers saw out the corner of their eye.
6 a giant protean unicellular organism.
7 a loose enchantment that slipped from its original object.
8 a possession of a djinn lady, as fluid in shape as its mistress.
9 a defective shoggoth manufactured by Elder Things.
10 a potter’s would-be masterpiece, which they died before they could complete, animated by their regret.
11 a swarm of modular cyborg microbots.
12 an experimental assassin that slithered from a biomancer’s flesh-vats.
13 a soul caught between reincarnation in many potential forms due to the confusing balance of their karma.
14 a remarkably talented and intelligent slime.
15 what was left after a halfway-successful attempt to remove the -wolf part of a werewolf curse.
16 a lobotomized doppelgänger.
17 an astral being of celestial harmonies violently reified into mere matter.
18 the unfortunate victim of a shape-vampire.
19 a miscast illusion that stole its maker’s solidity but became amorphous with no will to guide it.
20an imp that delights in confusion and deception.

D20This mimic can be revealed by 
1 its soft breathing.
2 feeling that it’s rigid where it should be flexible, and flexible where it should be rigid.
3 the pulse of its heartbeat.
4 the abnormality of its colouration.
5 its underside, which is a slimy foot.
6 its mismatched textures.
7 suddenly flashing it with a bright light.
8 unusual reflectivity or dullness for its apparent material.
9 bringing raw meat near it, which it will be attracted to as an easy snack.
10 it being quite a bit warmer than room temperature.
11 tickling it.
12 shocking it with a sudden loud sound.
13 jabbing it with something sharp.
14 splashing water on it.
15 its disguise apparently being made of much more precious materials than normal.
16 cats, which it is deathly afraid of.
17 bringing an object similar (though not identical) to its disguise near it, which the mimic will then copy before your eyes.
18 music, which it is compelled to dance along to.
19 scraps of past meals around it. It’s a messy eater and a bad cleaner.
20its corpse-like scent.

D20This mimic primarily detects prey 
1 through vibrations through the floor and through touches on its second skin.
2 by sniffing them out.
3 with the eyespots on its skin, which are much better at detecting motion than details.
4 by sensing their curiousity. It can’t detect them if they aren’t thinking about investigating it.
5 by extruding tactile strands, which might themselves be disguised as cobwebs or yarn.
6 by tasting them. The entire surface of its body acts as a hyper-sensitive tongue.
7 by echolocating them with cries outside human hearing range.
8 by way of magnetism, sensing the metal on them.
9 only vaguely. It can be distracted by anything sort of humanlike in appearance or movement.
10 through carbon monoxide from their exhalations.
11 by means of complex algorithmic comparison to past prey. It is prone to making inscrutable errors in judgement.
12 through thaumosense, perception of magical things and things exposed to magic. Wizards beware!
13 with its preternatural empathy. It’s better at detecting prey in pain or other agitated states than calm prey.
14 by telepathically piggybacking on their vision. If you can see it, it can see you, but if you close your eyes it’ll be as blind as you are.
15 through a symbiotic relationship with a species of small dungeon lizard which act as spotters for it, clambering on targets and chirping out their position.
16 with a sort of short-ranged omniscience of anything that goes on within five feet of it, down to the nano-scale.
17 by picking up the electromagnetic impulses of their muscles.
18 through glimpses of the near-future, only a few seconds hence. The present is imperceptible to it.
19 not by direct sensory stimuli but by probabilistic induction of where prey are likely to be and when.
20by using sensor-extrusions disguised as rats, attached to the main body by inconspicuous tentacles.

2 comments:

  1. Don't destroy the hum: I have reason to suspect it's helping you produce some of the greatest OSR monster content of this epoch.

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  2. This one is really good. Not just because I have a fondness for mimics, but I think it hits the right kind of notes. The "disguised as" and especially "revealed by" make these mimics uniquely gameable, but I could see "tends to kill by" and "primarily detects prey" also leading to interesting things. It makes me think of all sorts of The Thing like scenarios. Also I like that one of "detects" is a platypus. The "true form" at first I thought was almost just window dressing, but I think within the context of all the others, these too seem to contribute to telling a story from a single monster.

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