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Penny Arcade - Comic - D And Or D
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - D And Or D
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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(When the last time he left that bar?)
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"
(When the last time he left that bar?)
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"
I feel like vampires aren't that horrible in a universe that includes Illithids. "Oh, you're going to kill me by sucking out my blood? How quaint!"
I think the threat of vampires for most people in a D&D setting is that they can set up shop almost anywhere, exist almost in plain sight among unwitting people, and then corrupt/turn/charm people. Illithids and many other aberrations mostly stick to the Underdark and really stand out on the surface. While Illithids are better at the mental domination thing, a vampire may not even need that to convince people to support or serve them.
For adventurers, a lot of vampires aren't going to be that big of a deal. But the dangerous ones are really dangerous. Strahd isn't just a vampire, he's a vampire wizard. Even if a vampire wasn't an adventurer when they were turned, they certainly live long enough to pick up levels during undeath as well as accumulate magical items. Bob the town guard freshly turned into a vampire isn't the most dangerous thing in the world but Bob the 200 year old 15th level vampiric Eldritch Knight is another matter. Bob the Eldritch Knight who also masquerades as a local noble and has a castle full of mundane guards and retainers standing between the door and his chamber and enough connections to have every merchant and innkeeper in the county blacklist a party of adventurers is yet another layer of potential headache.
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I'm not talking danger or threat, though, I'm talking horror.
Illithid eats your friend's brain, they're dead and done. Vampire drinks your friend's blood, you may not ever know until your friend drinks your blood one day. It's not the same level of pure squick but there's a lot more potential for trust issues and not knowing what's real with vampires. Both are horrifying but one is horror monster stuff and the other more psychological.
edit: Ceramorphosis is horrifying too of course but once that's done the body's brain and the original person is completely gone. And there's no disguising that the illithid using the body isn't the person outside of the occasional specimen gone wrong. I think it really all depends on what kinds or horror hit harder for someone. Monster and/or body horror vs. psychological.
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Patton Oswalt, Vin Diesel, and whatever other celebrities playing a session with other actors lip syncing in the D&D world.
HBO start producing this golden goose already.
I hate to invoke the idea of the cinematic universe, because nobody has been able to pull that off apart from Marvel/Disney. Many have tried to emulated their success, and all have failed.
But! A cinematic universe is exactly what would work really well for D&D. They could go with a generic setting made specifically for the movies, or they could adapt one of the many pre-existing D&D worlds for film. A lot of them would work spectacularly. Forgotten Realms, Dragon Lance, Eberon, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, really any of those would be great to see visually on the big screen. But not as a single-shot story. They'd need to bare minimum make a trilogy to give the characters, setting, and villains a chance to grow.
Specifically on the subject of Forgotten Realms, that is easily the most well known, and they could go two ways with it. They could use movies to gives us silver-screen versions of fan favorite lore characters. A Drizzt saga. An Elminster Saga. A Cadderly Saga. They could fairly easily weave those into a cinematic universe, give each of them a few solo movies and then bring them together to fight against some sort of calamity. The other direction they could go with Forgotten Realms, however, would be to leave the big-name lore characters at home, and tell an altogether new story, using familiar names and places as a backdrop for something original. Honestly, I'd be ok with either approach. That's basically what Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights both did. Bioware took a well known geographic location and told a wholly new story set within it. And it worked really well.
If they go the route of Dragonlance for movies, I don't know how they could do anything other than tell the tale of Tanis Half-elven & Co. If they didn't tell that story, the community rage would shake the foundations of the internet itself.
Illithid can mind control your friend as well, and you wouldn't know it until they (insert whatever horrible thing the Illithid told them to do) one day. So it's got that going for it as well as the brain-eating.
And then you have stuff like: "When an Illithid undergoes ceremorphosis, it can occasionally take on some elements of the absorbed host creature's former mind, such as mannerisms. This typically manifests as a minor personality feature, such as a nervous habit or reaction (e.g., nail-biting or tapping one's foot), although the process that determines the type and number of traits so inherited appears to be stochastic. Some adult Illithids have even been known to hum a tune that its host knew in life."
That's some real psychological horror for you if that happened to your friend.
Plus, "A mature tadpole, selected after surviving a period of one decade in the elder brain's brine pool, was then inserted in the host's cranium through a nostril, ear canal, or eye socket. It then burrowed into the brain and quickly devoured the gray matter, growing in the process as it replaced the brain with its own tissue and attached itself to the brain stem like a parasite. This initial process, which happened over a period of a few hours"
It's not exactly a quick process. In fact, you have about a half hour before you can wipe out the parasite and heal back to normal.
And after the Illithid does take over you, there's all kind of complications to resurrection. Resurrecting a vampire victim is a lot less fraught in comparison.
And then you have the Intellect devourer. You go from Illithid slave to a brain on legs. Still you, though. Have fun with that.
To be fair, it was a garbage movie, but a great D&D movie. The flaws just accentuate the feeling that you're watching an actual adventure ran by an actual DM for actual players.
It wasn't the D&D movie we wanted, but it was the one we deserved.
It should have ended with a bumper that was a bunch of 1970s 12 year olds high-fiving.
I think that one doesn't have the same psychological horror effect that it does for vampires just due to the nature of Illithid culture and society. If they're trying to expand their territory they'll make a lot of use of dominated infiltrators but with their aversion to sunlight that's not going to be much concern outside of the Underdark generally. Also, their success rate with long term domination of people is not high and they don't seem to be much for subtlety (which kind of makes sense as they're colonies governed by a giant brain that needs food sources to sustain said colony, not individual schemers). Their ancient empire was wiped out when the space elves they enslaved revolted, wiped out a ton of Illithids, and hunt them still. Their dwarf slave experiment created magical Underdark dwarves that then revolted. They're Shadow Over Innsmouth biology but with Young Frankenstein methodology.
I honestly think the more extreme nature of the Illithid transformation makes it less psychological horror than a vampire story. The Illithid is so alien that it isn't recognizable. Literally alien in fact, like the xenomorphs from Aliens that will use a person for a host and emerge with some characteristics of the host but is a totally different being. Similarly, while one xenomorph makes a great horror monsters, the whole hive being involved makes it more weirdass monster story (which I'm obviously fine with seeing as how Aliens is one of my favorite movies ever).
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I've watched campaigns where a Lycanthropic Furbolg Paladin-Druid with a lightsaber fought Dracula by turning into a Velociraptor, and another one where the party had a civil trading conversation with objectively evil people that reincarnated as 8' tall demonic cranes.
I don't think the game can top that, no matter how "open world" it is.
Also, Jerry runs a weekly DnD campaign with a group and that one is excellent too. The weekly one is called the C-Team. Highly recommend if you enjoy watching people play DnD.
*Idris Elba has entered the chat
The Dungeon Run podcasts & videos are also good.