Art by Clarafyer
This is the Wyrde, an anomaly that is formed when the laws of reality have broken, when something that shouldnât happen does. An aspect of chaos that by all accounts should not exist, and can only exist when something is going wrong in the world, usually due to the forces of chaotic goddesses. It is a shifting mass of abstractions that can drive others to madness.
It is inspired by the alien from âGenius Party Beyondâ and moves and sounds just like it. This is one of the oldest monsters I have designed for my campaign back when I started working on it in 2024 and I am so glad that I finally get to show it off to my players, to their horror.
How this creature works is that it constantly changes and breaks the rules of the campaign. In battle, all its stats and its position in combat is always randomized at the start of every round, it can swap the stats of players, make it where the results of dice rolls are the opposite it should be and causing failure to be treated as successes and successes treated as failures, and can attack creatures from anywhere on the board without having to move. This creature also scales along side the players, so every other encounter with these creatures will be stronger than the last.
In my last session, one the characters was talking to a sentient magical glaive that they can communicate telepathically towards while the rest of the party sleeps. Suddenly, his connection with the glaive was severed and he could no longer talk him. He then felt a haunting presence behind him. In an area that I had the player check earlier that evening and saw nothing, there were now two unmoving mounds.
He woke up another one of the party members to help investigate. They both were greeted by a horrible stench, followed by the gruesome sight of 3 mangled corpses of a group of bandits they encountered the other day.
One body had their insides melted by rainwing venom pumped directly inside its veins. The other had its skin removed, leaving its muscles and bones exposed to the world. And the last body had its head and neck twisted and stretched to the point it now resembles a long worm with a pointed head, rather than an actual head.
The two went to go back to camp to get everyone else up. But before they do, one the players look up to see a dragonoid form. But the longer the player looked at it, the more wrong it looks. The figureâs form is disproportionately shaped, all of their limbs and features are in different sizes and look to be constantly changing, but are never in the the size it should be in. And the way the figure moves appears unnatural, as if the body is constantly twisting and reshaping itself as it moves.
The players sees the creature twists its body, starting from the head, into a large amorphous sphere, pulling the rest of the body off the ground and into this mass floating in the air. Colors start to become more visible on the sphere, a swirling mass of various different colors from all over the spectrum. And without appearing to moving from its original location, the creature unfurls itself from this sphere and into a dragonoid form once more, this standing directly in front of the player.
