Monday, August 11, 2014

Slaad (D&D 5e gods)


Gods of Trickery or Knowledge
The Slaad maintain the various bureaucracies of the outer planes. They are native to the boiling plains of rot and swampy decay in Limbo and rule from throne-temples composed of whole rotting biomes and massive forest-planets, strung together by gravity and psychic architecture. They are sempiternal, near-infinite in both form and knowledge, each Slaad overseeing millions of bureaucratic functions and billions of files and functionaries. Accordingly, though their minds are vast (often forming grand psychic palace-mazes of incredible intricacy and housing knowledge-treasure of incredible wealth and power and breeding monsters of its own subconscious*), the sheer number and inter-related complexity of their tasks gives one the impression that the Slaad is judicious to the point of inaction (the Slaad is making decisions and altering realities, just not the one you care about, please hold).

Debates would be held as to whether or not the Slaad are gods of apparent chaos-but-actually-supreme-order or gods of apparent law-but-actually-the-chaos-caused-by-law-imploding, but the Slaad are generally so catastrophic, their involvement/interference so terrible that the debaters are shouted down for being huge, insensitive assholes.

Slaad, being incredibly intelligent and powerful frogs/toads are also entirely self-interested. They eye realities and artifacts and minor deities like a frog eyes a fly.

Slaad are attended by armies of ghouls, each led by a death knight devoted to chaos or law.

Infant Slaad and their colonial psychic bureaucracies, arriving through space and planes like a wet, psychic meteors are apocalyptic events.

The Slaad's psychic puissence is so great and its voice plane-spanning (its lower tones dipping low into the elemental plane of water, where that place touches the elemental plane of earth; its higher tones causing the ground of Elysium to vibrate just so from time to time), that all correspondence had from the Slaad is via its attendants, the Salamandarin (Slaad bud** off Salamandarin by the hundreds of thousands, but also bud off other Slaad, as well as ideas that are sort of like toys and sort of like machines but are often used like batteries or weapons. So that's another sort of communication, albeit an indirect and mostly incomprehensible one).

Licking a Slaad
Does a few things: 

i.  it tells you something you don't want to know, didn't ask to know (the GM will tell you a secret about another character in the campaign or something like that). this isn't like the Slaad telling you, it's just something from the psychic fug around the Slaad worming its way into you like a virus.

ii. you can make a direct inquiry into the memories of the Slaad which are vast, and functionally infinite (gods, liches and dragons keep secrets of Slaad, but pretty much no one else) via something like astral projection or death (requires a DC 20 Cha Save or suffer 100 damage (save halves)... increased DC by 5 for the obscurity of the information sought. die in this manner and rise again as a zombie-like slave to the Slaad (1 in 20 chance you're something like a Death Knight champion of the Slaad, your armor a mess of flesh and bone and black metal, otherwise, you're basically a ghoul, albeit your paralysis works psionically).

iii. lets you see the Slaad's mind palace

it costs:

1 point of constitution for the duration of the effect (which lasts until you leave the plane on which the Slaad resides)

a secret you've been trying very hard to keep (your notion of self a bit loose, the secret wriggles out)

A DC 20 Cha Save or be charmed by the Slaad for the duration

Slaad mucus is volatile but can be used as an outrageously valuable spell component (esp if you're playing DCCRPG) and can fuel psionic charged devices.

Tricking a Slaad
Slaad can make/think anything from their backs (though it will be bent to the purpose most suited the Slaad), and there are myths of trickster gods tricking a Slaad to make it weapons or armies.

*adventurers beware for the mind-palaces of the Slaad are largely indistinguishable from the Mazes of the Lady of Pain

**think Suriname Toad

attribution: Vivarium Naturae of the Naturalist's Miscellany, 1790

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