Iconic monster substitutes, 2023 edition!

So a lot has happened in the past year regarding the Dungeons & Dragons brand. Wizards nuked their credibility and Hasbro is turning the IP into a mobile game microtransaction hellscape. The OGL is... well, for the first time since it's creation it's now considered poison and its former fans are now moving away from it.

So... fuck it. I'm gonna start a new series on substitutes from iconic D&D monsters. I'm gonna make up some ideas based on my past readings of various other monster substitutes and then I'm gonna release my writeups into the public domain so that everyone can use my ideas anywhere forever. You don't even have to credit me if you don't want to. I'm not doing this for recognition or profit, I'm doing it to satisfy my creative urge.

So let's start with one of the most popular ones: the mind flayer and the aboleth. I've seen several different takes on these, with the most detailed being the Phrenic Scourge by Lion's Den Press and later Dreamscarred Press, the Possessors by Ronin Arts, and the Lethid by Bad Axe Games. The latter also included effective substitutes for the displacer beast, the puppeteer, and the intellect devourer. I can't expect anyone reading this to shell out for a bunch of old books that may not even be available anymore, so I'm gonna just makeup a writeup here recycling those ideas but sanitized of any clearly identifiable IP. I guess.

So here goes... The following writeups I release in the public domain.

Alien Horrors: The Squiddies

The Squiddies are an alien race that lives by enslaving and parasitizing other species they encounter. They come in many different castes with different properties, all of which bear some superficial resemblance to deep sea invertebrates like cephalopods and crustaceans. They all have some form of psychic powers.

The most infamous form is the aptly named Tentacled Horror. These creatures are composed entirely of worm-like tendrils attached to a central trunk. They have no faces, eyes, mouths, limbs, or other remotely humanoid features. They can breathe and thrive equally well in air or water. They can maintain a loosely upright form with tendrils arranged to mimic a pair of arms and conceal their appearance by wearing cloaks and such. They have a variety of psychic powers, but the most dangerous is an area of effect attack that temporarily incapacitates the minds of their targets. The ends of their tendrils constantly shed and regrow like fingernails, but serve a key role in their reproduction: these ends are their parasitoid larval form. Upon contact with a potential host, the larvae will burrow into the body and make its way to the brain. It will instantly kill the host once it reaches the brain, then consume the corpse as nourishment until it reaches its adult size. Larvae that fail to find a host quickly die.

Some larvae are particularly hardy and can survive a fair amount of time after being shed. However, these ones exhibit abnormal growth and properties. If they find and take a host, rather than killing and consuming it they instead attach themselves to the brain and take control of the body. This allows the Squiddies to use the host as an infiltrator. These internal puppeteers can reproduce by extending a tendril from their host's mouth that sheds new larvae.

Although all Squiddies reproduce asexually as described above, there are dedicated breeder forms sometimes called "queens." These queens are massive conglomerations of tentacles that continuously spawn swarms of larvae, or in some variants puppeteer parasites (see below). They can also be used as signal boosters for telepathy due to their size.

There's some genetic transfer when larvae consume their hosts. The Squiddies have exploited this property to breed a number of different castes with more specialized purposes. These include bulky warriors covered in crustacean armor, lithe infiltrators that disguise themselves with psychic illusions, etc.

Perhaps the most grotesque castes are the various dedicated parasite forms. Perhaps selectively bred from the hardier larvae mentioned above, these parasites are much more versatile.

The tiny leech ray resembles a mix of manta ray and leech, like those aliens in The Puppet Masters. Once it finds a suitable host (typically humanoid), it burrows inside the body and attaches to the spinal column to exert influence over the host's mind. While unable to freely dominate the host and reliant on subterfuge, it is so deeply embedded in the nervous system that it cannot be removed safely without surgical means. Otherwise, their psychic abilities are minimal. They serve as spies and saboteurs.

The flying head squid is a mass of tentacles that uses telekinesis to fly through the air. Upon finding a suitable host (preferably humanoid), it engulfs the hosts head and takes control of their nervous system. Their psychic abilities are useful in combat, so they serve a similar role to the tentacled horrors. They can puppeteer dead hosts, but cannot halt the inevitable decomposition. They have venomous tentacles that they may attack with whether hosted or unhosted.

The plane jumping squid outwardly resembles the flying brain squid, but prefers to target large animal hosts. It attaches externally to the spinal column and pumps the host full of stimulants and steroids, using its long tentacles to supplement the host's natural weapons (these tentacles drip sedative venom). It's psychic abilities are minimal, but it has a plane jumping ability that it can use to teleport between two points any distance apart so long as the entrance and exit points meet a criterion specific to each plane jumping squid. This could be shadows, flat mirrored surfaces, corners inside vertices, knots, smoke, book pages, etc.

Then there are two enslaver forms that control victims through psychotropic means.

The hidden master puppeteer is a mass of tentacles arranged in the shape of a huge aquatic fish. It is physically impressive and a gifted illusionist, but by far its most impressive feature is the acid ooze constantly secreted from its body. While this acid ooze may be sprayed as a defensive weapon, its primary purpose is to spread a contagious brain-rotting disease. Vertebrate animals of lower intelligence exposed to the ooze contract a brain-rotting disease that rots their nervous systems and turns them into zombies under the master puppeteer's control. A single master puppeteer may control and see through the senses of hundreds of zombies at once up to a couple dozen miles away from it. Master puppeteers typically specialize in one or two species, such as rats or other vermin.

The true master puppeteer is an even more powerful version of the hidden master puppeteer. Its psionic abilities are vast: in addition to mental manipulation and illusions, it can warp spacetime to damage opponents. It's brain-rotting slime affects creatures of higher intelligence and its control radius is at least doubled. Its zombies ooze infectious acid slime, produce a maddening drone, and the master can use them as extensions of itself to extend it psionic powers' range!

These are just a small selection of the possible castes that you can devise. Feel free to invent your own!

A glance at "Bestiaries: Creatures of the West and East"

Back in the late 2000s Stephen C. Klauk wrote two bestiaries, Bestiary Malfearous and Bestiary Nefarious, for his decades-old homebrew campaign setting Amberos. In addition to a lot of original monsters created for his setting, it includes a number of substitutes for WotC IP monsters. These include the serpentine aspii in Bestiary Nefarious and the octopoid menten in Bestiary Malfearous, who are described as mortal enemies in their similar quests to remake the world in their own image. Nice.

The two books are also each several hundred pages long. Damn. If only I were so creative and dedicated...

Anyway, the aspii are immortal serpentfolk that use alchemy to transform others into hybrid slaves, and the menten are octopoid aliens from the Realm of Madness that feed on minds (not physical brains, but the energy of the mind itself).

The aspii are similar to other serpentfolk I've covered previously, and share traits with all of them. The true aspii are giant semihumanoid cobras (similar to the illujan lords and anguineum ophiduans) with snakes for arms (similar to the inphidians from the Tome of Horrors series). They create hybrid slaves through both alchemical transmutation and more conventional crossbreeding.

The menten are semihumanoid octopoids that use modified tentacles are arms and legs. They were created by someone else to conquer the material plane by devouring or converting the inhabitants. There are several degrees of slavery, including being mind-wiped, used as raw material to make a horrifying "flesh engine", or taken to the Realm of Madness and transformed into "thrallkin" who form the lowest rank of the true menten species.

Unfortunately, aspii and menten don't seem to be Open Game Content. Not that I mind considering the other substitutes available, but the bit about them having similar goals and therefore being mortal enemies was actually pretty clever and I'm surprised nobody else thought it up. I'm definitely borrowing that bit.

Puppeteer parasites

Puppeteers are a monster based on the common scifi trope of the puppeteer parasite. Puppeteers were initially a blatant rip-off of the aliens from The Puppet Masters. When they first appeared in the 3.0 Psionics Handbook, they were depicted as ray-like creatures capable of gliding short distances like the aliens in the story. In the d20 Modern rules, they were depicted as louse-like and fed on the blood of their hosts. In the 3.5 Expanded Psionics Handbook, they lost their gliding ability and were depicted as slug-like instead. A variant known as the "flesh harrower" was introduced, which is a blatant rip-off of the aliens from Stephen King's Dreamcatcher.

Puppeteers were originally created by the mind flayers, but since the latter aren't OGL they were replaced with the phrenic scourges when Dreamscarred Press (the same authors who wrote the 3.5 psionics revision) wrote their own adventures and adapted psionics to Pathfinder. Dreamscarred Press provided further details on the puppeteers, such as the "hive brain" variant in the adventure Uncertain Futures.

Here are some in-character factoids about puppeteers to inspire your imagination:

• Puppeteers were created by the phrenic scourges for the purposes of infiltration and subversion. They are not particularly intelligent and require the occasional oversight from their masters.
• The species is divided into several specialized castes. The most common are puppeteer, flesh harrower and hive brain.
• The hive brain is responsible for reproduction and communication. 
• The puppeteer comes in at least three body types for better camouflage: slug, louse and manta ray. The manta ray form is capable of gliding short distances.
• Puppeteers subsist by siphoning harmless amounts of blood from their host. If multiple puppeteers attach to the same host, the blood loss will become harmful.
• Some puppeteers act as brood mothers who asexually spawn immature larvae, provided they have a source of biomass on which to feed.
• Some puppeteers may produce spores which grow into a red fungus known as byrum. If the byrum is consumed by a potential host, it will germinate within the digestive tract and fatally emerge as a flesh harrower. This has earned the moniker "shit weasel".
• The most intelligent and psychically formidable puppeteers are the "mind maggots". Unlike their kin, mind maggots act on their own initiative and require no orders. Indeed, some have rebelled against the scourges in favor of working as arcane familiars. Their fatal flaw is arrogance: even as a familiar they will still nudge their host in the direction they believe is correct. (see statistics in Monster Encyclopaedia II)

A brief guide to mind flayer substitutes

So Mind Flayers are considered product identity by Wizards of the Coast and third-party publishers cannot mention them. Months ago I posted a brief post about how my setting would replace them with several races that worship the big Cthulhu himself, but in this post I would like to discuss substitutes in an out-of-character fashion.

Ecology of the Phrenic Scourge

Of all the substitutes for the mind flayers in third-party products, my favorite has to be the Phrenic Scourge.

Nomenclature: aquane, brilkoun, durlans, mind eater, nyarl, ochthichthuruch, paretiophage, psycholus, starspawn of Cthulhu, thought ripper, the worm that walks,

Description: writhing masses of seafood with prodigious psychic powers and dark designs on the hero's love interest

Ecology of the Cult of Cthulhu

Since mind flayers are product identity, I decided to replace them with some open content substitutes. The Cult of Cthulhu are the offspring and avatars of the Great Old One Cthulhu. All of the various freaky psychic tentacle monsters from monster manuals, bestiaries and third party products are different varieties of the Cult. UPDATED 10/30/2017