False Hydra

goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/false-hydra.html

Common wisdom holds that false hydras come from the ground.  They spontaneously
originate as undifferentiated masses of flesh. Potatoes that sprout from no seed.
 Supposedly, they germinate in response to lies, and that each falsehood causes a false
hydra to swell larger.

Scholars agree, because they have no better idea.  In fact, so much about these
abominations boggles the mind that scholars really don't know where to begin.

Paranoia dominates any discussion about it.  Everyone wants to know: Is it here?  Is it in
my town?  Is that long, flaccid face watching me through the window even now?

There are false alarms.  Criminals and deserters

have pleaded that they were merely under the
influence of the false hydra, or that they were
merely trying to escape it's influence.  And
sometimes that was the truth.

There are ghost towns in the Grey Waste.  Victims

of false hydras.  People do not revisit those sites,
out of fear of vengeful ghosts.  And perhaps the
false hydra is still there, the black rot at the center
of the bone.  And how would you know?

In gentler lands you will find skeptics.  These

erudite scholars will stroke their chin and calmly
tell you that there is no such thing as a false hydra.
 It is some confabulation.  Villages seized by some
infectious insanity, or perhaps some subtle demon. i want you to focus on the neck
  and also on the mouth

But they are wrong.

How to Use This

Article

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Use it however you

want.  But I would
use it to challenge
the PCs as they
wander.  It'd fit very
well in an episodic
game.  The PCs
wander into a new
town--a new threat
emerges.  

Can someone make a

random table titled
"What's the Deal
With the Town?"  1 -
so there's no pictures of a false hydra because no ones ever drawn one
People are all

but just let me pontificate about this guy for a while

friendly, evil
believers of the
Worm God.  2 - Plot of Tremors.  3 - False Hydra.  4 - Et cetera.

Infiltration

The false hydra enters a town through a humble

enough method.  Fattened on worms, it has been
growing upwards these last few days (weeks?
years?), but has only now broken through the soil.
 It emerges in a basement, from behind the jars of
fruit preserve.  Or pushes its face up through a
broken cobblestone.  And then it begins to sing.

While it sings, it is ignored.  It just creates gaps in

your attention and then slips through them.  It is
subtler than invisibility, and more reliable.

At this point, the false hydra is only a torso--

presumably about the same size as a man's--buried
somewhere in the ground.  The neck grows up, up this is dead hand, from zelda
until the head emerges from the ground.  The head
is only the size of a man's head at this point.  It
resembles a man's head, too, but white, hairless, and with thick deformities of the brow
and lips.  The eyes are wet holes.

But of course, none of this is noticed.  While it sings, the hydra exists in our blind spot.

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Growth

The hydra eats people, of

course.  To eat someone, it
must usually stop singing,
which endangers the hydra
someone, since it can now
be noticed.  To make this
task easier, the hydra
usually drags the
unfortunate victim a short
distance underground, into
also make sure that your head is level with regards to the image
a basement, sewer, or small also make sure that the image is not too small
chamber that it has
excavated, and devours
them there.

A man is walking along a deserted street.  Suddenly he realizes that the silence is more
profound, as if a loud noise had just ceased.  There is a rattle as a sewer grate slides over
rough stone.  In that darkness, a fleshy face, leering with undisguised hunger.  It lunges
forward on a thick neck that slides out of the darkness like a sheath, one foot, three feet,
six feet long.  And then it bites him on the arm and drags him down that narrow gap,
yanking and twisting to fit the man's body through that too-small space.  And when the
sounds of eating have ceased, the song resumes.

The man has family, friends who will notice his absence.  But the song of the hydra
massages their mind, smoothing the wrinkles on their brain.  The hydra has eaten the
man, who is now known to the hydra.  The song erases the memories from their soft
heads.  They will not notice his absence, nor remember him.

And in this way, the hydra grows.  It's neck stretches long. . . longer.  And with it, its
influence.

Dissonance

The false hydra's song hides the memories of

the devoured victims in the same way that it
hides the false hydra, but this is not a perfect
system.

Wives will wonder why there are men's clothes

in her closet.  People will notice that no one
has lit the street lanterns these last few nights.
 Churches suddenly find themselves without a
bell ringer.

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By and large, these gaps close themselves up.

 The wife will forget about the clothes as soon
as she stops looking at them.  Or she will
conveniently remember how her brother left
them there the last time he visited.  Or she
will, on some level, recognize the wrongness
implicit in the clothes, and throw them away
one moonless night.  She will confabulate,
powerfully and constantly.

But part of her mind is cognizant of the

disturbance.  That part of her mind is
distrusted, and sealed away.  But that
primordial cluster of neurons still fires.  A
syphilitic madman who has been locked in the
there is so much good fanart of this guy
attic by his family, but whose mutters can
sometimes be heard during the lulls in the
dinner party downstairs.

This creates pressure.  In the early stages, this feels like paranoia, especially the sense that
someone is watching you (and the hydra is watching you, pressing its moony face up
against the window and fogging up the glass).  More severe symptoms develop.
 Reminiscing becomes a stressful and uneasy experience, and so is avoided.  Distortions of
memory.  The confabulations pile up, identities become muddled.  Friend's faces seems
subtly deformed.  

Human brains were not meant to bear this weight.  Mundane insanities sprout like
mushrooms.  Nervous disorders. Psychotic breaks.

In severe cases, split-brain occurs,

when one part of the brain strives to
communicate with the other.  One of
the PC's limbs might suddenly become
its own entity, one that crudely and
violently struggles to convey the
danger to the PC.

A PC might wake up and discover that

someone has scratched "IT'S
WACHING YOU RIGHT NOW.  THE
WINDOW." into their chest, and there
is skin beneath the fingernails of their
left arm, great.  If they receive a

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distressed letter from their mother,
wanting to know why the last letter the
PC sent contained the sentence "it ate
him ate him in front of me but i did
not see it ate him" inserted in the
middle, great.  If they decide that their
hand is possessed by demons and cut
it off, best of all.

This could also be the hook for the

PCs: an acquaintance sends them an
innocuous letter that somehow
contains the phrase "help me for the
love of god help me help".  When they
get there, the acquaintance has no
memory of writing it, but looks
look how happy he is
nervous (and a little bit insane) while
claiming that it's probably just some
wizard's prank.  

"And where is your wife?"  

"Why, I've never married.  Why would you joke about this?"

And the next day, tell the players that their PCs have forgotten about the wife as well.  You
can't get rid of the metagame knowledge in their heads, but allow them to act on their
metagame knowledge whenever they can roleplay an intense feeling of paranoia or
distress.

Their dreams are filled with dirges, spilling from the mouths of faceless people.  And
somewhere, a pale face, whose eyes are nothing but wet, black holes.

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 which is impressive, given that he only had about three polygons when he scared the crap out
of all of us as kids

Proliferation

As the false hydra matures, it grows more heads.  The process accelerates exponentially.
 More blood on the cobblestones.  More incongruities festering in heads like gangrenous
limbs.

The false hydra gets careless.  With every meal, it becomes more powerful, more able to
smother mankind.  It doesn't need to be careful anymore.

The heads stretch up higher.  Their gracile necks sway above the rooftops.  Their heads
have grown feral.  The skull bulges with masses of bone.  The lower jaw juts out, low-
slung, like a dagger in a fist.  Soon,  it will finish devouring this city.

But darling, my darling, there isn't enough blood in all the world to slake its thirst.

Attack

The players may suspect that something is

invisible, but the usual magical
countermeasures for fighting invisibility
won't work here.  The song is closer to
charm or suggestion, than anything else; I
would allow anti-charm magic to have a
temporary or partial effect.  Just enough for
a few gargled words of exposition.  "It's
watching us right now!  Look!"  That sort of
thing.

But how do we actually position the false three polygons that DO NOT FUCK AROUND

hydra where the players can find it with

good play?

One option is to make the hydra visible in mirrors.  They might come across this solution
relatively early in the investigation process.  Arming the populace with hand mirrors is
a solution (but also how many hand mirrors does a medieval town have, really?), and will
probably stop the daytime predation.  But the hydra will continue to eat people during the
night, when there is no light to make the mirrors useful.

Do cats see it?  They probably freak out around it.  Dogs have no idea, though.

A more interesting, but also more challenging option is to allow them to investigate
strange occurrences.  If the lamp lighter was eaten halfway through his task, the last lit

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lantern is a bit ominous.  If a player slips on a blood spill, the PC will have to suffer
through the cognitive dissonance of having to rationalize a huge, obvious piece of
evidence, but the player is under no such compunction.  They can investigate the nearby
alley.

Other options
present themselves.
 They could figure
out where the necks
stand in the sky by
triangulating with
an ally on a different
rooftop, by
discovering which
cloud patterns are
obscured from each
other (because the
false hydra's neck
occludes them).
just pretend that the hands are extra heads and you've pretty much got it
 Bizarre ideas might
work, like shooting
arrows around randomly or constantly swinging a grappling hook around.  

If the grappling hook bangs into the false hydra, the psychic suppression will probably
just force the PC to absentmindedly pick up the rope and resume swinging it, but a second
PC watching the first PC would notice this irregularity, because that's another degree of
separation from the hydra.  The mind-song hides the hydra, not the irregular behavior of
a fellow adventurer who swore to shout an alarm if the grappling hook hit something
invisible.

Baiting the hydra would also work well, and is probably the easiest method.  While the
hydra bites, it stops singing, making it visible again.  (Or more accurately, allowing the
PCs to stop ignoring it.)

If it is wounded, it will probably retreat down to its subterranean lair.  The PCs will have
to kill it now, before they fall under the sway of its song, which it has now resumed (and
the PCs can hear again, properly.  It is a nightmarish howl.)

If the PCs tarry, they'll forget they ever saw the false hydra.  The fictive paranoia (and
actual metagaming) will be rampant, but this is okay.  Their left hand is just giving them
more useful messages today, as more as more of the PC's brain rebels.

The HD of the false hydra depends entirely on how large it has grown, which depends on
how fast the PCs have acted.  The fight could be a cakewalk or a meatgrinder.

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Metastasis

The PCs abandon the town to its fate.  Or perhaps they
just fail utterly at investigating this weirdness.  Either
way, the worst has come to pass.

The false hydra doesn't just eat everyone and then die.
 That would be too easy.  Things Get Worse.

When a false hydra is mature (some texts localize this

event to the day when it has grown seven heads) it
begins to sing a new song.  This song mentally enslaves
everyone within hearing range.  It's like a broadcast of
dominate person.

Yes, give the PCs a saving throw.  But even if they make
it, they're going to be in the middle of a town where god, that worm-neck
everyone is trying to kill them.  The colossal apparatus
of the false hydra is now visible.  Monstrous heads on
tree-trunk necks tower above the town, leaning over rooftops and peering into windows.
 Its bellowing voices order its mindslaves to kill that man over there, or to capture the
fleeing child over there.  (Of course it can talk.  It always could.  It just never had anything
to say.)

Only when the town has been

purged, the false hydra orders its
servants to exhume its body, now
grown swollen and fat.  And while
they dig, it eats.

And then the false hydra orders

that it should be transported to a
new city, where there is new flesh
to be eaten.  It will be borne there
atop the backs of its slaves,
grateful legs staggering under its
cold tonnage.  When it gets too
large to carry they will lash it with
chains and drag it behind them
like a wailing, blubbery siege
and you're left wondering
engine.  (Which it is.)
underground?
what do the parts of it look like that are still

Of course, this is unsustainable.

 As soon as a mindslave is outside the range of the false hydra's voice, they'll flee.  (Unless

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they tamp some wax in their ears and return for their loved ones hahahahahaha.)  Unless
it raids other food stores, it will starve.  It cannot farm or hunt sufficient food without
spreading its servants across an unacceptably broad area.

And the uncommon adulthood of false hydras is marked by desperate aggression.  An
animal convulsing as it dies, crushing people and cities under its hungry bulk.  It usually
heads for the largest cities (or whichever one the PCs have fled to) while seeking the
largest food source.  Sometimes it succeeds long enough to grow larger and move on to
the next city.  A tour of death.

The "traditional" tactic is to set fire to the granaries and evacuate the city.  The false hydra
will starve to death in a few weeks, while everyone visits their relatives in the countryside.
 The false hydra's movements are tracked by scouts on horseback, who watch the
abomination from the horizons and communicate by flags.  Many of them choose to
mutilate their own ear canals, in order to deafen themselves.  

These tactics failed spectacularly in the summer of 882 TFM, when there were multiple
false hydras colluding with each other.  (The exact number is still disputed.)

A more pressing problem is

bandits, preying on families
traveling alone with all their
wealth.  Looters also linger in the
cities after the evacuation order
has been given, and many
eventually fall victim to the false
hydra, and allow it to grow larger.
 Assassinations and power
struggles are also common, as alternatively, it could just mature into this fucked up thing
with sphinx powers

different parties use the chaos to

seize an advantage.  

And lastly, a military presence must ensure that no mercenary company, slavelord, or evil
wizard is allowed to open up lines of communication with the false hydra (using
messengers).  Those avenues of exploitation have allowed some absolutely horrific
tragedies in the past.  The cancer must be isolated until it is forced to eat itself.

If the game gets to this point and the PCs want to stay involved, I would turn the focus on
the latent possibilities in the last four paragraphs, instead of assaulting the god-monster
head-on.  Because who wants to fight a false hydra at the height of it's power.  (Lots of
players, probably.)

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NisseLindblom drew this one.

god, false hydras are freakish

their fragmented minds are mirrored in the people they devour

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 fun fact: dragon hydras are awesome

i should write a post about them specifically

fun fact: there was a false hydra in the house of hours

but the party never discovered him

he was at the bottom of a looooong stairwell

fun fact: lonely, lonely hydra

no one to talk to

except himself

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 fun fact: I'm actually pretty good-natured and pleasant to be around
I don't know why I keep writing such horrible things

fun fact: raaaaaaaaa

fun fact: aaaaaaaaaaawr

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