After Hours: National Dungeographics
Added 2018-04-06 22:38:12 +0000 UTCA lot of RPGs talk about the ecology of dungeons, but what does that really mean? In this episode, we got special guest Jeff Barber of Biohazard Games to discuss this topic, plus some more reviews!
Temple of Blood: a 3E D&D module
Gramercy Island: Tom discusses some of the odder characters within it.
Song: On the Run by Quine
Comments
This is the issue the ecology of mindflayers made no sense to me so i tinkered with it for my setting. And this just further confirms it and reminds me more why i want to try Blue Planet
DiploRaptor(Samuel)
2019-03-04 11:47:35 +0000 UTCAlso have been slowly working out ecological ranges for creatures (magical and non-magical but still fantastical) in my homebrewed DnD setting and the hopefully upcoming UnderDark game in the same setting.
Sean Britcher
2018-04-17 04:41:07 +0000 UTCI remember something in a 3e book about Mindflayers being from the far future that then fled backwards in time to the distant past to escape some cataclysm and brought the Gith (slave and food species) with them and some time later the Gith revolted leading to the two Gith descendant races we know now. Iβm a fan of this particular history of the Illithids myself.
Sean Britcher
2018-04-17 04:39:05 +0000 UTCOne of the high level healing spells - maybe restoration - regrows missing body parts... might be more cost effective if they perfected a version that just regrows a brain.
Dan Kassiday
2018-04-13 15:38:38 +0000 UTCYou wouldn't be dying every week, probably once a year or something like that. The mindflayer needs to send you to gain new experiences and that takes time.
Ross Payton
2018-04-11 19:29:55 +0000 UTCOne catch with the raising dead scheme is that in D&D spells of resurrection have significant cost. At the very least you need expensive material components, and depending on the edition it will drain xp or constitution from the caster and/or target. Also, the target of the raise must be willing to come back. Even if the Mind Flayer is able to keep up the ruse you laid out, the person may just decide they're sick of dying every week.
Eric McNaughton
2018-04-11 16:08:10 +0000 UTCI really enjoyed this, would love to see more of it
Tim
2018-04-09 02:07:07 +0000 UTCYes, but there's the last few episodes of Season 1, which are way too intense for a comedic podcast. Plus all the casual child nudity.
Ross Payton
2018-04-09 00:26:19 +0000 UTCMongoose is undisputed king in that category though.
Ross Payton
2018-04-09 00:25:37 +0000 UTCI vaguely remember reading things about the biology of mind flayers and I knew there was published material on it but I feel like that's an entire podcast right so I had to stop at some point.
Ross Payton
2018-04-09 00:24:55 +0000 UTCGreat episode. I have a biology background, but it's more micro- than ecology and I definitely enjoyed the discussion. So the mind flayers cultivate an environment where young people are encouraged to seek out new experiences and extremely specialized knowledge? In fantasy worlds, universities were founded by mind flayers? Ross' sketch of what the mind flayer home dimension looks like was very cool and really disturbing. This was a fun way to flesh out the sometimes nonsensical D&D monsters and I'm looking forward to the next time Jeff Barber visits.
Ken Ringwald
2018-04-08 21:39:43 +0000 UTCLate in AD&D 2eβs life, WotC published a short line of books about specific βiconicβ monsters, which included pseudo-scientific info about their ecology & lifecycles, and there was one about the Illithids. I remember the bit about illithid tadpoles being in that book. I also recall that, according to that sourcebook, at the end of their life-cycle illithids re-entered the spawning pool they came from to merge with a giant illithid brain that lived in the depths of the pool. The Illithid had a religious belief that they would become part of the hive mind that inhabited the giant illithid brain. But in reality, their minds were consumed by the brain in much the same way that illithids consumed the minds of other sentient beings.
Bryan Rombough
2018-04-08 19:29:56 +0000 UTCAh Goodman Games, producers of *prime* d20 shovelware.
Bryan Rombough
2018-04-08 17:17:39 +0000 UTCA thought for Crossing the Streams; the anime Made in the Abyss. It's a pretty easy one to put as a fantasy dungeon-crawl/hexmap setting, but there's a lot of cool things inside that make it interesting.
Liam Murray
2018-04-07 08:36:20 +0000 UTCHad a thought after you skimmed past the reproduction part - I know that in at least one version of mind flayer lore, Illithids produce little tadpoles that swim around in a larval stage for a while, until eventually you feed them a brain and then they pupate and mature into the full humanoid illithid - well, here's an idea for ecology. They're like metamorphic insects. The mind flayer form is actually the 'mating' form that goes out, hunts down half a dozen brains, and then creates a spawning pool with a ready supply of food for the larval form, and then dies of starvation while protecting the nest... or at least it was until the species developed sentience and then the mind flayers decided they actually like being alive thank-you, and instead of reproducing and dying within a fortnight, they just keep eating brains to sustain themselves - ecology gone out of control after the introduction of pesky individual self-interest.
TeapotsAkimbo
2018-04-07 04:00:15 +0000 UTCooh...you didn't even really get into Illithid reproduction. That's where it gets really screwed.
Timothy Connelly
2018-04-07 03:15:24 +0000 UTC
