Redoing the Numenera Bestiary: the Ds

Continuing forward.

Dabirri: This is a picture of a jellyfish. The book says they are "created by taking the heart of a creature the size of a human and placing it in a synth shell" which is the coolest bit. So I'm imagining a crawling jellyfish with a beating heart in it. Sloppy and gloppy and quivers and lashes out tentacle after tentacle to drag itself around. That would be good. Their poison ignores armor since it briefly phases the target into Hell and back. And we can say that these are the hearts of mutineers who give up their hearts to the sea in order to avoid hell.

Decanted: Okay, so this is a golem that turns invisible and steals people’s heads. Jesus. They have cold hands. Man oh man. But the idea of a golem with a head in its chest is basically good, and the picture works.

Okay so I’m going to use the original picture, but instead of ceramic or metal it’s a golem made of silk surrounding a cut block of frozen memories with a head in it. It moves like a puppet. I imagine that when someone important dies - like royalty, or a national hero - but they also know important national secrets - their head is frozen and protected in these special puppet golems.

You could have separate hit-points for the frozen head and the puppet head, and it ignores damage to the silk bits. It doesn't touch the ground and can flit around like a kung fu master. Its claws still do extra cold damage, and it can partially thaw the frozen memories surrounding the head so it sprays freezing memory around it, and everyone touched by it is stunned while they experience a flood of foreign memories. When the frozen head is damaged it sprays the frozen memories in a random direction.

Dedimaskis. This is actually a complicated magical mask and when you wear it, it can do the following: 1/week shoot four prismatic lasers dealing 2d6 damage each as 3 + Charisma bonus, OR shoot one laser up to 1 mile dealing 4d6 damage (as same). While worn the wearer cannot sleep but if they meditate for 8 hours they get the same benefits as a long rest plus 3 extra hit-points per level.

Dimensional husk. This is perfect. It's a person surrounded by all of its alternate realities partially phased into our reality. It can make 1d6 additional attack each round, it’s damage ranges randomly from 1d4 to 1d20 (simulating which weapons from its alternate realities it wields), ignores 25% of all damage, and its AC changes each round: 1d20 + 8. It can still teleport as an action. One per week it can rip a dimensional husk from a PC (as in the DM intrusion) which acts as the PC +/- 1d4 levels and accrues 1 dimension per minute until after an hour its a fully formed new dimensional husk (with a bizarro personality of course).

“A dimensional husk spends its existence confused.” No it doesn’t, it speaks every possible sentence simultaneously and knows more than any soul confined to just one reality at once. It can be consulted to see into alternate futures and pasts. It’s what happens when someone is afflicted with possibilities - maybe they mis-wielded a might sword, or was swallowed by Zuggtomy's rot, or were ravaged by wild magic.

Dream sallow. A tree that puts you to sleep and melds with your brain so your mind melds with the tree’s mind. This is a hard one: the tree avatar is already taken by the dryad so I don’t want to overlap, but I like the idea of a special dungeon inside an evil tree.  This is probably more like an tree that’s absorbed the minds of thousands of tortured dead souls, like the petrified one in the graveyard in Deathfrost Doom, and probably each of these trees contains a powerful spell, or you could need to consult one of the souls trapped inside. So here's what you do: you climb onto the tree and impale yourself on it and its bloody sap mixes with your blood and a door opens into the tree which leads to the labyrinthine reality where all its souls and secret spells live as well as the heart of its secret malice.

Drebil. It’s another bat but this time it’s also a mimic. We already did bats and I don't like mimics, so it’s probably a kind of goblin. A dreblin, if you will. It has extraneous and large wings that can’t fly but also that it can’t comfortably fold, so it folds its wings endlessly, alone, like a cat rearranging its fur. It can also refold one item into another item, ("Yes, I shall turn your shield into a crystal lantern . . . for a price!") but after 1d10 hours it starts to come undone and must be refolded. It’s just an abject 1 HD AC 10 goblin that can imitate voices, is vulnerable to cold iron, eats the eyes of children, and serves witches.