How to Run a FALSE HYDRA in Dungeons and Dragons
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- Опубликовано: 14 июл 2024
- How to you give your players the feeling of losing their memory?
The False Hydra is one of the most infamous and unusual monsters in dnd. Its almost an urban legend. Countless folks talk about it and its almost 4th wall breaking powers. But how do you actually run one? How do you actually make your players FEEL like they are fighting a false hydra? This video hopes to answer that question for you, and in the process, create one of the most immersive experiences your players will ever have.
Follow these instructions and your players will be blown away.
The Infamous Article: goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014...
00:00 Intro - Immersive Gameplay
01:08 Warning for Players
01:46 The False Hydra
3:50 The Setup
4:56 Dropping Breadcrumbs
6:05 The final piece of the puzzle
7:53 The Reveal
8:25 Aftermath
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Игры
Have you used a false hydra in your game? How did it go?! if you would like to see more mystery/twitst encounter building episodes, let me know! And don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to support the channel.
How does a combat scenerio go with a false hydra?
Im planning tonadd this into my campaign
Im starting a campaign that will feature this monster and the Bagman. We'll see how it goes
Gonna be trying my hand at this here in a few days, got some amazing ideas from this video so massive thank you!
Oh my god this is so incredible and not what I expected at all!!!!! Thank you for not giving vague tips and instead giving us an ACTUAL PLOT, that's so rare and I'm going to use it for sure
I'm glad you found it helpful!
I recently ran a custom monster that works very similarly to this. After watching the video I realized it was pretty much a reskined False Hydra, but it was different enough to catch some older players off guard. Instead of the song making you forget, sleeping does. It burrows into your dreams and alters your mind, so I also used Exhaustion, giving time pressure since they couldn't rest near it withouth forgetting everything about it. I did things like document duplicates with slightly different information, changing notes, etc. Making a portrait with an extra character would've been such a good way to convey just how much memory altering effects can change things, I wish I had thought of that!
Here's one more thing. Have a spot at the table empty and after the player figure it out take five and when nobody's looking, put a character sheet at the spot.
What the... You are evil incarnate.... The sheer IRL paranoia... I'll use this.
One of my players has schizophrenia so I won't be doing this but that is hilarious 😅
I've heard similar ideas floating about for a while now. I ended up using it to kind of flesh out some of my players' backstories a bit (always ask permission to do some backstory shenanigans).
The "party member" that was eaten was some random mishmash with a level or 2 in ranger, thief, druid, and wizard. Not much use in a fight, but pretty handy for someone living on their own in the wild. A bit too old to be adventuring, but didn't have much interest in it to be honest.
Also had a funny habit of picking up random strays and getting them started on the path of adventuring. Sure, he wasn't _great_ at anything, but he was good enough to get a ragtag bunch of misfits with nowhere else to go started. They were talented enough to walk the rest of their chosen path themselves.
The party itself was the usual assortment; ranger, thief, druid, and wizard. All with some vague and ambiguous backstory and lots of blank spaces the players just couldn't be bothered to fill in (except the cleric who was played by the other DM in our group). Once everything was done, they look around for anything of value (as adventurers do) and spot a handful of leather journals lying around. All enchanted against dirt, grime, and damage.
The pages are filled with accounts of their past adventures. Going further back; they read about when the writer gave some smarmy elf some tips on how to not suck at archery, the waifish street urchin that tried pickpocketing him when he was in town, the idiotic dwarf that tried taming a wolf using an apple, and the apprentice wizard who kept stuttering his spells. I had the cleric player help me fill in a couple journals with absolute _boatloads_ of information (we'd help each other out with props for our respective campaigns, he made sure to work me like a rented mule later). Everything with the tone of an exasperated, yet proud father.
An empty backstory became a canvas for me to paint a mentor/father figure that they would never remember. It kinda messed with their heads a bit.
In the words of the campaign's wizard, "That's ***ing evil, man."
This is SO GOOD. I was considering using a false hydra for our Halloween game but this is so much better than anything I was considering.
thank you!
I'm planning on running a false hydra oneshot for Halloween. These tips are awesome!
amazing! I hope it goes well!
How did it go?
Well, I was wondering how to run a false hydra... That was genius! I will do that and I hope the reactions are as visceral as you hype. I would love to see what my players do. Thanks for the video.
Sounds like a cool idea, I just wish I was good enough to pull it off. XD Side note: I'm loving your editing style, especially how you use gifs and images in the background.
Thanks man. That is a huge compliment coming from you.
I've wanted to use a false hydra since seeing the dungeon dad video on the creature, I even have the exact mini you showed in the video, and now I want to do exactly what you've detailed in this video so bad. Imagine handing the players an actual journal that has what amounts to session notes detailing this character's life and how important this character was to the party's most major victories. The revile would be legendary! I've been very slowly working on making my own homebrew world while DMing official 5e adventures and now I absolutely have to make a town devoted to the false hydra! Thanks for the incredible world building Idea!
Right, the old trash is for immersion, also I've needed to immerse myself for the last 3 months to write the campaign
The portrait idea is genius!
I fucking love this, definitely running this in my campaign!
This is an AMAZING idea and video. Just in time for the spookiest month.
thanks!
Absolutely mind blowing!!! You are such a badass Cinder! Love this channel!
awww thanks!!!!
This is insane, I need to do this absolutely to my party, I already wanted to use a false hydra in my campaign because it needs weird mechanics and strategems to be dealt with and I think that more monsters need to be like that, I love this too much
I absolutely NEED to use this as soon as possible!! This id absolutely genius!!
Oh my gosh as a new DM this gives me chills… and I LOVE it
Loved this, such a crazy but fun idea
Thats what I'm here for!
This video was so well written and had so many incredible lines..... I hope one day im as good of a writer as you are a DM.!
Oh this gives me ideas. Twisted, evil ideas.
yessssss
Oh THIS... Is genius... THANK you for this!
This is amazing, I'll have to run this with my party
This is awesome
I will say this about the false hydra: The idea rocks, most executions of it for DnD sucks.
But this might be the first time I have actually considered using the false hydra.
The reason I say it sucks is because everytime I hear about, there's always the thing of: "Oh this person disappeared, and people don't remember them at all." Then the player characters shouldn't remember either, which means the players shouldn't remember, which means you already fucked up, need to give them some mental plot armor or you need to give them a brain injury
Exactly. The only idea I could come up with is that False hydra does not actually erase the eaten person completely. You need to hear it's song to forget about him/her. Meaning, if you were far enough or deep in the mines or smth you could come back and be the only one asking questions. But not for long, soon you'll forget everything like everybody else.
I would say that is an easy fix. Mementos and trinkets that can lead to places and make them realice they have been there without memory.
It's not that the PC's don't remember the person. They are just generally aware of the clear cognitive dissonance in front of them. I would agree however, a DM can screw it up pretty badly, as the story itself is difficult to construct without continuity errors. There's a right way and a wrong way.
Wrong way: The players receive a letter from an innkeeper they met a while ago, Alice, inviting the party to the inn and she mentions that she runs it with her husband, Bob. The players meet Alice at the Inn, and ask about Bob. But she's not aware of a Bob. [The players at this point should have forgot about the existence of Bob as well, so it doesn't make sense that they would even know to ask about Bob].
The right way: On the party's journey, they come across a journal, made by a man named Bob. In it, he writes about how he has been working in the outskirts of the city for multiple days. And that he is so excited to finally go back home to his wife, that runs an inn, "The Jolly Bay Bar & Inn". He mentions his wife's name is Alice, and she is famous for making chicken stew. The party later finds an inn in town named "The Jolly Bay Bar & Inn", and as they sit down to order, someone yells to them, "Try the chicken stew! It's Alice's specialty!" The players confront Alice, asking where Bob is, but she denies that Bob exists. [In this case, the players are aware of the existence of some random guy named Bob. They know that, "Some man named Bob exists in the world. He has a wife Alice. And Alice runs an inn." But this man Bob is not specific to any town. It's entirely possible that a different Bob exists, in a different town, that just so happens to also have a wife Alice that runs a different inn of the same name.]
The DM needs to be vague enough, such that the specific identification of the person is not critical to the player's understanding of the story.
A more specific example. The portrait idea doesn't work as it's written, since when they players look at the portrait, they shouldn't be able to perceive the additional member. If one member was gone, they should simply be incapable of noticing that additional member in the picture. If they're currently in a 4 player group, and there's 5 players in the picture, they should still only be able to see 4 people. But what they could do instead, is have the painter charge them 50 gold originally. And that when he gives them the painting, he also hands back 10 gold and says, "By the way, I overcharged you earlier! I usually charge 10 gold per person, but clearly I only painted 4 people for you. Here's the 10 gold back, sorry about that!"
@@RGS578 I do admit that DnD is a lot about interpretations. But I feel like your interpretation of the false hydra in the last part of your comment, regarding the painting, goes against everything I have heard and read about the false hydra. It stops you from perceiving itself and forget the ones it has eaten, which is in accordance with what is described in the video.
I also see what you are going for with your 2 examples, but in my opinion, they are too close to each other for it to work differently from each other, but I do see the merit of the approach
@@TheSpoegefugl Thank you. For what it's worth in the portrait example, I agree that goes against everything you read/saw. It's a pretty common scenario people use, and I think it is just a logical inconsistency DMs regularly miss. I will definitely say, on a functional level my change to the portrait scenario would be less impactful for the player, as it is significantly less obvious that they are under the charm.
I think that my interpretation seems to be the most consistent. That the deceased are treated as if they are in the same blind spot as the False Hydra, rather than simply forgotten. Otherwise you run into issues regarding their blood/torn limbs. If the player simply forgets the dead, they would see the town is mostly destroyed, with blood & death all around them. (Which to be fair, I see a like 75/25 split on people running this, on whether or not players can see evidence of the killings. Most choose to keep it hidden entirely, but a sizable amount of people will show evidence).
Very cool scenario! I hear John dies at the end.
For the subclass competition: the mom from incredibles
oooo
I was a player in a game based around a false Hydra, we played it maybe a year ago, and it still gets mentioned all the time, it really was a memorable game.
I just noticed this was posted a year ago... Coincidence?
😏
Spider-man would be great, or Gwen. Maybe a symbiote like. Klyntar? All of these would be cool to play as
I had my own idea with the artist part tho so you dont have to come up with a way to explain an extra party member you could have the artist start the piece and request that your party comes to retrieve it in say a day or two and when that day comes you go to his house not knowing why you needed to come here besides it feeling important than exploring and finding the painting of your party not knowing why it’s here at all and who did the piece
My suggestion would be one of the main protagonists from the legend of dragoon ps1 game
Why am I wearing a wedding ring
Also, if any player casts silence, any player that happens to be inside the silence area should start seeing the monster, as long as they are inside. Then, once out, they forget they ever did. In my opinion this works very nice as some sort of endgame mechanic. Maybe fighting inside of the silenced field is the only way to defeat it?
Could you do dio or jojo on the subclass competition
Ooooo
Dude, this is pure evil.
I’m a new DM, and I am making a false hydra one shot as my first DM game. There’s a couple things I’m not sure how to navigate that maybe you might have ideas about.
First, I’m not sure how to introduce the idea of an NPC that the players met on a previous day being eaten by a hydra. The players and PCs shouldn’t notice that the merchant stall that’s empty today used to have a merchant in it yesterday and wonder what happened to him. I was thinking about having a father and son duo meet the party on day 1 and then the father be missing on day 2, leaving the son with no parent to take care of him, but the players shouldn’t know that anything has changed. How do I navigate that?
Additionally, if a player wants to do a perception check because they think that something is off and rolls a nat 20, I can’t just let them break through the hydra’s song effect, but what do I do instead?
Finally, is your opinion that leaving the radius of effect of the hydra’s song would return memories of the eaten people to players, or is it that the memories are gone forever? There’s something extremely sad about the idea that the players will never be able to remember their other party member or what he or she meant to them, and I like the idea of the town holding a memorial ceremony after the hydra is finally defeated over a gravestone erected in honor of the people they lost but know they don’t remember. But I don’t know how to explain how the hydra’s magic or effect works that everyone will just permanently forget a person that it eats.
This video was great, by the way.
You would need to reference the vague idea / description of a person, without actually identifying the person specifically.
For example, you can have the players read a newspaper article, describing a merchant that sells watermelons with his son Felix. When they arrive at town, they meet a child selling watermelons, named Felix. The PCs are aware that, "Some merchant exists, with a son named Felix, and they sell watermelons." But it is just a coincidence that a different child merchant also exists selling watermelons in the same town, that doesn't have a father. It's perfectly plausible for a second merchant to exist. But if instead you met the father the day before, and he was gone the day after, the story itself is contradicting itself. You should avoid actually meeting people that die, as that is impossible within the narrative.
I wouldn't allow them to break the effect with any roll. A good roll shouldn't break logic. If it's the case that pigs can never fly, then just because your player casts the spell, "make pigs fly" and rolls a 20, the pig will still not sprout wings. It's just logically impossible, and it's okay to stick with that.
You can modify the underlying logic that governs how memories are lost / regained. The most common one I see, is a period of "remembering" is perceived as a time-skip / brief moment of not knowing what just happened. Like, they were mid-conversation at the entrance of a bar, and then randomly just "come to their senses" and find themselves sitting at a table, with food already in front of them. Something happened in the 5 minute gap between entering, sitting down, and ordering. But you just don't explain that gap. Also - Most people play it, such that everyone permanently regains their memories after the False Hydra dies.
1:15 me new to DND with no DM since i haven't played yet: welp
This is the best idea Ive ever heard in my life. OH MY GOD! God tier level. Amazing….simply amazing. Im going to fck their minds…muahahahaha
Here's a challenge for you. Could you make Dante, from the Devil May Cry game series, somehow work as an Archlich? 😏
👀👀
I think it's stupid that there is no counter to the false hydra's ability, but you made an excellent plot hook for the monster!
There are some counters. If the characters exit the range where they can hear the hydra singing or deafen themselves, they regain their memories and are able to see it. They can also see the monster if it's reflected somewhere, just not directly (sorry for the bad english)
Silence is a hell of a spell dawg
Was it jason and the argonauts or odysseus who had to lash themselves to a mast and have their crew stuff their ears with wax so they didnt hear the bewitching song?
Whoever it was, a counter to the false hydra has been a literary trope for roughly 2700 years