Ultraman to Dungeons & Dragons to Ultraman Lifecycle

Perhaps, as a reader of a D&D blog, you are already familiar with the theory that some of the plastic toys that Gary Gygax was inspired to make D&D monsters off of were bootleg toys of Ultraman monsters - bulettes being based on a toy of Gabora, for example.

You may be less familiar with the theory that there was an Ultraman monster inspired by a D&D monster - probably because I just made it up.

However I am not making this up in the same sense as the mentally-unwell lady who once told me that I had been disassembled by lasers which also removed my memory of that experience - without prompting, without evidence - but in the sense of revelation given to one of God's holy fools who sees the connection between A and E and leaves the busywork of B, C, and D to others.

To cut to the chase, I think the Ultraman monster Mother Deents was inspired by aboleths.

Evidence A:

Evidence A-2 - refer to eye colour

Evidence E:

Evidence E-2 - Higher definition image, Mother Deents getting throat-chopped by Ultraman

Aboleths were invented for I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City published in 1983, and the Ultraman episode featuring Mother Deents airing in 1998. I'm not going to do any real research, but apparently Fighting Fantasy books were big in Japan in the mid '80s, so it's not beyond possibility that a costume designer for Ultraman saw an illustration of an aboleth.

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

D12 Weapons in the War on Christmas

Joyless atheists, christians who seek to excise syncretic contamination, jews who are tired of getting chinese food every year around that time - war can make strange allies, and perhaps none stranger than the War on Christmas. These are the arms they wield against that holly jolly holiday:

1. Aerosolized Herpes Simplex Virus: Rigged to proximity dispensers placed by mistletoe arrangements.

2. Soy Milk: Mixed with 11 secret additives to make it indistinguishable in flavour and texture from full-fat cow's milk, yet retaining all phytoestrogenic properties to weaken Santa's masculine hyperborean vril.

3. Extra-Cancerous Firelog: Nobody is slipping down a chimney lined with creosote from these logs without picking up a few tumours.

4. Resonant-Explosive Ornament: Seemingly-ordinary glass Christmas ornaments, carefully designed to burst into anti-personnel shrapnel when exposed to the sonic frequencies of caroling.

5. Thermite Stocking Stuffers: React poorly and immediately with coal put into the stockings of naughty children.

6. Magnetic Audiovisual Injector: A device which overwrites micro-sections of video cassette tape with subliminal and subversive anti-seasonal messages. Declined in usefulness with the end of popular use of VHS and suchlike formats, though many collectors have unwittingly been turned into Manchurian agents.

7. Archeo-Feline-Scented Santa Suit Rentals: A blend of pheromones collected from modern day felines with a chemical regression applied to make the blend match the smell of the primary predators of the ancestors of homo sapiens sapiens. Even brief exposure will cause an intense panic response in the limbic system. Application to Santa suit rentals quickly creates a negative Pavlovian response in children.

8. Oneiric-Medium Memetic Viruses: Implanted into children's unconsciousnesses at select facilities. The natural fading of the memory of dreams protects the children from the effects of the viruses, while anyone seeing them while they are sleeping will receive the full impact.

9. Rooftop Punji Stake Pit: If the fall & two-foot long stakes don't kill any large flying mammals landing on the roof, the mashed organic matter laced with Chronic Wasting Disease prions slathered on the stakes will. May require some attic renovation.

10. Propaganda Pamphlet Distribution Blimp: Treated for cold-weather operation. Strafe the North Pole dropping communist, anarchist, and Georgist propaganda translated into Elf. Unclear what economic system Santa's workshop operates under. All spies have been returned candied or encased in icebergs.

11. Evil Advent Calendar: Contains chocolates made with cocoa produced with the least-ethical methods possible. Believed to disrupt Santa's naughty-nice sense.

12. Spider-Silk Gift Ribbons: Sticky, impregnated with lethal dose of spider venom. Stiff microfibers lining the weave maximize odds of breaching skin and making blood-venom contact.

D6x6 Crooked Crawling Claws

Click the button below to generate your very own crawling claw:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	This crawling claw has
1	had the flesh between its metacarpals severed, with extra fingers grafted into the gaps.
2	an exceptional size, because it is the hand of a giant.
3	several arms and elbows stitched to the stump of it wrist like a prehensile "tail".
4	no flesh, only cracked bones and dripping webs of ectoplasm between them.
5	finger- and palm-prints that have deepened and keratinized into hard and unsettling whorls.
6	thick black nails and matted fur, because it is a gorilla's hand.

D6	Beware! For this crawling claw
1	can hijack one of your hands with its antipathy!
2	is rife with disease, and the slightest scratch could infect you!
3	will explode like a hand-grenade when destroyed!
4	can climb any surface, like a gecko!
5	can feel out the shape of your footprints and track you over many miles!
6	can fire the joints of its index finger like bullets!

D6	This crawling claw was created
1	to be a fancy back-scratcher, but it scratches too much and won't stop til it's scratched all the way through your back.
2	as a spy, to hide in small spaces, listen in through its fingertips, then later write down what it's heard.
3	by a negative energy bomb that caused most of the bodies affected by it to rot away, with the energy concentrating in and reanimating a singular part of those bodies - besides crawling claws, hopping feet, rolling heads, slithering intestines, flapping skins, and suchlike were created.
4	to fight in tandem with another undead, tripping enemies up from their blind spots to create openings for its partner.
5	when someone suffering from alien hand syndrome hacked off their rebellious paw.
6	as a dextrous labourer with the capacity to defend the products of its labour.

D6	This crawling claw moves
1	like an unusually-coordinated flopping fish, slapping and wriggling about.
2	like a freshly-severed limb twitching with the last of its nerve impulses.
3	with arachnid speed and precision.
4	fluidly, joints bending in ways that would be agonizing for the living.
5	like a starfish, fingers splayed and swaying.
6	by curling up into a fist and rolling about.

D6	Without eyes, this crawling claw primarily detects the living
1	based on their body heat - coals or recently-worn clothes can fool it.
2	by the sound of their breathing, and those breathing raggedly will be targeted before those breathing calmly.
3	by the radiance of their life-force - it can perceive those close to death only dimly.
4	by the vibrations of their heartbeats - if you keep off the ground it'll have a tough time picking up yours.
5	by the scent of their blood, which it sniffs out with new pores that go right down to its marrow.
6	through something like radio, extending its fingers into the air to act as antennae.

D6	When left idle, this crawling claw will
1	tap out half of a song as if before a piano.
2	curl up stiff and rattle like a dead bug in a breeze.
3	scratch at nearby furniture like a cat.
4	trace out the letters I L O V E Y O U over and over again.
5	balance atop a single finger and slowly spin.
6	cycle through various profane mudras and vulgar gestures.

Twelve More Module Ideas

Like so: https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/12/twelve-module-ideas.html

1. Chaos in the Quarantined Quarter: Their wealth did not buy them an escape from the seal placed to keep the rats and their plague in - it remains within with them, while the rats have become clever and cruel and the plague makes people strange.

2. Talons of the Colossus: A great bronze statue, humanoid yet inhuman, and hollow within - two warring cults reside in each leg, and even they fear to dare the mechanisms higher in the body.

3. Voyage of the Undying: The ship returned from the land beyond the sunrise overgrown by a silver tree - from its blossoms comes a curse of wretched immortality.

4. Rift to the God's Sepulcher: An earthquake has devastated the region, and opened a rift to a cave network where a primeval god and its children were once worshiped - rife in sacrifices, and stalked by the degenerate thing the god has become.

5. The Monastery of Miscarried Malice: The monks of a rich and learnéd monastery succeeded in a ritual to split their sins from their souls - now monstrously embodied, their sins run amok.

6. The Palace Past the Blazing Caul: A wildfire whips across the land, but through its heat-shimmer a marvelous palace can be glimpsed - some who have leapt through the flames have returned burned and burdened with treasures.

7. Legacy of the Lighthouse-Keeper: The lighthouse-keeper left behind a journal, and nothing else - throw a fistful of the herbs which grow atop the beach-dunes onto the beacon-fire, it says, and a path will appear out to a shining castle in the surf, full of wonders.

8. Festival of the Fantastical Fungi: For one week every hundred years the greatshrooms erupt from the bowels of the earth to cloud the skies with their spores - their inner chambers hold myconid menaces and precious effluvia.

9. Beneath the Old Silk Market: The old silk market was opened in the morning for business to find the flagstones flipped over to reveal tunnels beneath them, splatters of blood and threads of sticky silk leading below.

10. Lake of the Mutagenic Meteor: The meteor created a lake in its impact crater overnight - its glow has mutated the lake-life, and the first round of miners sent for its anomalous ores refuse violently to return.

11. It's Free Masonry: A flood has swept the earth away from the base of a stela crafted by an ancient and advanced civilization, revealing it to be only the tip of a much larger buried complex.

12. The City That's Always Today: The city was legendary in its day, now merely infamous - it repeats the same day, every day, always ending in its doom of black rain - seek its riches, but do not become enmeshed in its patterns or you too will become stuck in its cycle.

D6x6 Debilitating Dracoliches

Click the button below to get your dracolich:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	This dracolich is
1	plastered with red river-clay and crumbling brick-stuff as facsimile-flesh, with twin obscenely-large gemstones for eyes.
2	composed of the contorted bodies of a hundred grey and hairless people - possessed and transformed by consuming the dracolich's self-cremated remains.
3	draped in its own leathered hide, its bones scrimshawed by its own claws in maddening micro-detail.
4	entombed within a floating black egg of rune-carved stone.
5	flayed, perpetually red, wet, and raw, great verdigrised nails driven into its joints and key meridians.
6	mummified, its torso stuffed with fragrant spices and powdered petrified wood, every one of its dry and cracked scales inscribed with a poem.

D6	This dracolich sought lichdom
1	to outlive their rival and continue to exist so as to torment their rival's descendants into eternity.
2	because in life they were an avid breeder of humans, yet even their natural lifespan proved too short to breed humans into their highest vision.
3	becaused they were cursed with a destined death - they passed through that death, and cheated it with undeath.
4	because it foresaw the end of heavens and hells and souls and the rest of the extant cosmos entire, and wished to escape that extinction.
5	because they were born in a hothouse era of their world, while climate conditions changed in their lifetime to make the world colder and drier - they long to see again the lush beauty of their youth.
6	because their ambitions will eventually lead them to the stars, and interstellar travel is far easier when one doesn't need life-support.

D6	This dracolich is known to living dragons
1	as a bogeyman they were told stories of as hatchlings.
2	as a capricious sage who can dispense knowledge from ages far older than they are, for a steep price.
3	only by inscriptions in the oldest of ancestral dens.
4	as an abomination which they are religiously-commanded to exterminate.
5	as a vicious paragon of their kind, intolerant of peers yet a bulwark against the burgeoning mammals.
6	as a name they can call for a favour, so long as they are willing to give their own life in the bargain.

D6	This dracolich's breath weapon is
1	is a torrent of diseased and lumpy putrescence.
2	is a billowing cloud of burning-cold ash.
3	is a fog of flesh-rotting undead bacteria.
4	is a flood of ectoplasm that provides an ideal medium for ambient ghosts to manifest physically, and to possess those coated by the ectoplasm.
5	opens crackling rifts to the plane of negative energy, irradiating surroundings with anti-life.
6	is a burst of boiling blood and bone-shard shrapnel.

D6	This dracolich's lair
1	is within the craters and tunnels of a meteor circling the planet, brushing just close enough for the dracolich to breach the atmospheric gap at its closest approach.
2	is a half-buried ziggurat out in the desert - once the temple of a god that opposed the dracolich, they have taken some joy in turning it into a monument to their own self-glorification.
3	is an entire continental pocket of the hollow earth, underdark, veins of the earth, etc., claimed as their sole & sovereign territory.
4	is the lava-tunnels & aquifer-caldera of a super-volcano, which is also their phylactery - destroy one or the other and the super-volcano will explode to an apocalyptic conclusion.
5	is in the cavernous chest of a giant zombified antediluvian lobster marching endlessly across earth & sea-bed, its stringy remaining flesh repurposed into curtains between its interior segments.
6	is in the donjon of a nigh-impregnable castle they tore from the earth and set in the sky atop a flying island.

D6	This dracolich hoards
1	actors, costumes, props, and even entire stages of an archaic style of theatre.
2	fossils, and lobotomized prisoners, collecting the drool of their prisoners to mortar together fragile chimeric fossil creations.
3	theologians, philosophers, books of great import - they are endlessly entertained by spirited debate.
4	the first tools of nascent civilizations.
5	bells, from the smallest silver janglers to great bronze bells stolen from church-towers.
6	everything used to keep time - sundials, clocks, hourglasses, and so on and so on.