How about instead the mindsong enslaves the listeners over a period of days. they still don't remember hearing a song but players would experience something deep in the crypts of the village calling to them. It could turn out the whole village was enslaved by it a month ago and regularly starve themselves to makesure livestock goes to the false hydra instead. It solves the problem of the npcs not being able to "remember"/help and the players will figure everything out according to the pace of your story. out of game knowledge would only get them to the step where now they have to locate it's lair and they know the enslaved towns people who are putting on an act won't help them. Fairly typical dnd experience but you get to use your cool monster and on your terms. much love jacob❤
tbh i think the worst part is that there is a real life false hydra; dementia. this isn't even a bit or something i'm writing to be funny - you just fucking forget how you packed your shit up and got in your car, plus the three minutes you spent on the crapper beforehand. brushing your teeth, and the next thing you know you've parked your car in the concrete complex you've used for decades at your job. things aren't how you remember them, twisted and wrong. spots of memory are just entirely missing.
I did it once. The party entered a town. It only attacked the villagers, not the party. In the end after they killed it the party found a letter from another member of their party (a divination wizard) who saw their death and knew it was coming. This party member had never existed before this session. This showed that they had forgotten this member of the party had ever existed. It was really cool.
I also had a young girl in the town who was deaf and mute. She did sketchings of everyone in the town, including those that had been eaten. She also had sketched the party when they entered the inn (including the divination wizard).
I feel like this is the way to do it without having to "gaslight" players. Have the them play through events that occur in their already modified memories, which contains some weirdness and contradictions (because the Hydra's song can't account for everything around the missing people) but which makes sense once they figure out what's happening.
I did something very similar but with my divination seeking sorc. She's been away for a while because I took over as DM. Did quite a few adventures without her and some strange things would happen here and there. So it was a pretty big surprise/hit for them to realize their former party member that even the players remember is dead and no one can remember her. It was a great time, something I have been seeding over the course of years with my cartoon villain "The Eraser" who they would run into his followers every now and then on side quests that I ran when I wasn't the main DM. I doubt I'll ever top that.
The problem with the false hydra is it's infamy, as a result it’s better to make a completely different monster or curse and use that instead. While pull ideas from it. Because no matter if players are new or old, someone is going to go “you mean a false hydra.” And then you have to play around that.
Yeah, the monster can't be beaten until you metagame, and if you metagame it ruins the monster. It works great for stories but terrible for actual play.
Honestly, you can use that your advantage. A false hydra is more effective on a party who doesn’t know what a false hydra is, so if you do have something different, but that still gets up to anti-memetic shenanigans, the players thinking it’s a false hydra could lead them into a false sense of security letting you pull the rug. Personally, I have false hydras be canon in my world in that they’re a folk tail but don’t actually exist. Of course, if I ever want to run one, I easily could, and if my players metagame, they would know that false hydras are supposed to be a hoax, and they’d be thrown off the trail.
@@robertmoss196Nah it can work if you give enough informations for your players to figure it out. The false hydra is not perfect. Find the flaws in it’s system and scatter them through the adventure for the players to find and figure out. I did it and it worked wonders. No need for metagaming. Monsters are supposed to be beaten. Giving tools to beat it is not ruining the monster. Maybe that’s the problem if people envision running the false hydra as an optimised super cool monster that will likely kill the players.
The key to running it well seems to be not telling your players they forget stuff they actually played through, *but hinting at them having done things they didn't, or known characters they haven't actually met at the table.* The most chilling account of a false hydra game I have heard of was an instance where a party from a larger campaign stopped at an inn after an adventure, and a painter offered to paint the party in honor of their good deeds for the town. The painter told them it'd take a while to finish the paintings, and so they left for their next adventure with the intentions to pick up the paintings when they returned. Their next adventure centered on a false hydra, and after they killed it and wrapped things up, they went back to the painter to collect the paintings. *There was an extra painting of a character they had never encountered before amongst the portraits, and everyone in the town asked them where their companion had went.* They allegedly spent several sessions back-tracking through the places they had adventured in before, collecting fragments of information about their dead friend from NPCs that had 'met' them. Generally, I think it's a very delicate sort of monster to use, because all of the impactful strategies for using it involve ret-conning the story somewhat and also subjecting players to some pretty disturbing themes which might hit a bit close to home. I think it's the sort of thing that is best played off by a DM who has known their players for years, and who had an extensive session zero, but who had that session zero so long ago that the players won't see it coming or be able to theorize accurately based on guesses about why such specific triggers were cleared in the session zero.
@reallyannoyingguy6625 I don't see anything wrong, what's the last sentence of the comment look like for you? For me the last few words are "such specific triggers were cleared in the session zero".
That falls into the caveat that the only way to properly run the False Hydra is conceptually, and only with gaslighting the party. As a monster it's only popular because it was told as a pseudo-creepypasta. In actual games it's underwhelming and the DM's doing all the work they could've put towards an actually interesting version of the same concept.
While horrific, I would argue The False Hydra is actually a MYSTERY monster, so treat it as one, so that means for the love of all that is holy DESIGN CLUES! You gotta drop this thing in there with the intent that the party solves the mystery! Perhaps a deaf beggar is acting weird, and vandalizing the streets with messages of "look up!" Gee, the bard's music sounds strangely muted, I wonder why? The "gaslighting" also has to be handled correctly. There's a way to preserve the illusion without ACTUALLY gaslighting the players. Perhaps they walk around a corner and... suddenly the streets are empty? Why are the PC's clothes bloodied and their weapons drawn? I've run this monster successfully four times and each time they players loved it. Hell, I loved it when it was used on me and I was introduced to it then! It's all about how you do it!
Basically, it comes down to gaslighting the characters over gaslighting the players. The players figuring it out should not be the end goal, it's roleplaying the characters solving the mystery. Not the only correct example, but when my group had it ran for us, we were just in a city we planned to shop and stay the night at on the way to our actual destination. So the party was split all getting the clues separately but not taken aside for individual scenes. We as a group had a bigger picture than the characters (though still only the DM knew the False Hydra lore at the time, so not a complete picture), and had to roleplay logical ways for us to put the puzzle together. Worked really well, since the campaign was already kind of "monster of the week" themed (in flavor, not in number of sessions per arc), traveling across the world (and eventually planes and one other material plane in the multiverse, but without Planescape setting travel) hunting down different related and unrelated (often eldritch) threats.
I really like the idea of turning a corner and then jump cut to the aftermath of a fight. I wonder how large the memory lapses could be. Could whole months suddenly be forgotten? You arrive in spring in the town plagued by the false hydra, and after staying there for maybe a night, you wake up and suddenly it's autumn? That sounds cool! I just love all the possibilities of this monster.
i feel like it loses a lot of its lustre if the players are aware of the false hydra in a meta way, so it getting popular ironically made it worse. It's hardly a mystery if you hear the DM do this and immediately know there's a false hydra in play
@@Shalakor yeah, the thing is, players can easily figure it out since by now the monster is pretty famous but that doesn't mean the characters figure it out so it can still offer interesting RP.
The original version of the false hydra was an article that didn't really even have stats, but was more of a well describe explanation for the creature's lore. It explained its evolution better, and how it effected peoples minds. It also gave a number of examples of how to present it to players in the narrative.
The source material isn't much better, to be honest. False Hydra's just a writing exercise and concept, effectively an overblown creepypasta. It's awful to actually run, and it's such a completely binary monster in that if you don't metagame you can't do anything and if you do then it's trivial to defeat. Anything fundamentally predicated on needing to gaslight the players will never actually pan out in a game, the only redeeming piece is the concept of the consequences surrounding the False Hydra, the monster itself is such a nothing conclusion to that buildup.
@@KaleidosXXI Its popularity speaks for itself. It's a concept that can be given a variable amount of difficulty. It should be treated in stages, like the age of a dragon, and given more power as it matures. The d&d beyond version doesn't do it justice. If you struggle to make this monster work in a game, that sounds more like a you problem than the monster, lots of people are using it and are producing fun stories as a result.
@@KaleidosXXI The secret is to not focus on gaslighting the players. Let the players figure it out out at their own pace, and then let them gaslight their own characters until the characters can figure it out too. It's a roleplaying and potentially exploration encounter first, followed by a boss fight.
Quick, put your headphones on and listen to your favourite loud music! If you see something unusual don't look it in the eyes and -what on earth is this in front of my window dear lord it's in my house please someone help I must get out and warn everyo-
A false hydra isn't a stat block. Its a plot device. You can't even FIGHT the thing except at the end of the adventure, at the point when it has been fully discovered and is now possible to defeat it. Every moment prior to that there is no need for a stat block.
I agree. I personally think the most important part of the False Hydra is the clues. The worse thing you can say is "You don't remember." because it undermines your player's effort.
"You feel like you should remember, but the thought escapes you somehow" or "none of you can agree on what the innkeeper from last night looked like, or if the inn even had a keeper in the first place. You think they must be running errands this time of day" It's more making people come up with justifications on why things are odd. The wife not knowing why there are men's clothes in their house could go to explain that they're of a relative's who has gone to war on the other side of the world, or because they want to open a clothes shop sometime in the near future.
@@Velcraft I dislike the former because it's trying to retcon notes, which is really dumb. Give the obvious NPCs hydra plot armor or else you will go "Oh, you don't remember if there was a mayor." to the player who has a page of notes on him. As for the latter, I think that's one of the good parts of the hydra. Have multiple people have contradictory justifications on something to make the players know there is something deeply wrong happening.
@@ferociousmaliciousghostthe solution is not to kill anyone the players have met and roleplayed with. Decide who dies before the players interact with anyone and then have those that died never show up. The impact of what they did can be shown in other ways, they can investigate town on their own and the DM tells them lots of information about it. Later it can be revealed that the mayor did show them round, only he is dead so no one remembers. The trick is to play it from the point of view that your memories have already been altered, and what you are roleplaying is an adjusted memory.
@@intergalactic92 I think the same way as well. I think the only thing that I would do differently would be that the PCs just got there instead. So, they are a fresh slate reacting to them. The main bulk of the clues for knowing what it is and fight is through the "split personality" that was said in the stat block.
Now that I am thinking about it, if you want to forgo the horror aspect and lean heavily on the mystery, you can easily let the PCs control the split personality/subconscious to try to learn what the weakness is and how to warn themselves.
Originally when I heard the name "False Hydra" I thought it was a spellcaster's attempt to make a hydra out of body parts and it became this huge abomination with multiple humanoid heads as a result
I ran a false hydra early on in my current D&D campaign. The party consisted entirely of casters at the time: a wizard, a druid, a bard, and an artificer (who started the game with a satchel of encouraging letters and trinkets from home). I started with a basic array of adventures (which are important to the telling of this story), made slightly easier to compensate for the lack of martial damage: A fight aboard a ship, during which the sailors aboard the ship were useless except for one that landed a critical hit with his bow; attacked by a vicious pack of wolves who were already scuffed up from an apparently previous fight; a battle through a crypt taken over by a cult, who were also similarly scuffed up from a previous fight; and breaking into a warehouse where some thieves had stolen a shipment of gold (a cityguard who joined them ruined their stealth approach by deciding to just kick in the door.) Anyway, they ended up in a town where people where acting odd; the artificer was particularly bothered by it for some reason and went to bed angry that night at the inn. They investigated the next day and found a bunch of people who had forgotten things (the shopkeep had a wedding ring but insisted she was single; a stray dog the druid spoke to who insisted they had no master despite being well-groomed and having a collar; a growing orphanage full of kids who never knew their parents, etc.) That evening, they found the journal of a monk passing through who noticed the same problem and had looked into it, then had gotten frightened out of his mind and escaped the town. The journal mentioned the monk hearing the faint notes of a twisted song, and at this point people the artificer succeeded in a wisdom saving throw and realized he had forgotten something as well. He noticed the satchel he was carrying had initials on it that were not his, went through the letters and trinkets and realized they belonged to someone else, and finally a name jumped to his mind, and the mention of the name made the others remember too: the artificer's brother, a fighter, had been with them the whole time. HE was the one who landed the critical hit aboard the ship fight; HE was the one who had inflicted extra damage on the wolves and the cultists; HE was the one who kicked down the warehouse door impatiently. The gaps in their memory had all been rationalized as something else. They had an argument the night before, which is why the artificer felt angry; his brother left to do his own investigating, leading to him being killed by the false hydra. And, as the party came to grips with what was happening, they too could now begin to hear the faint sounds of a discordant song drifting on the winds, as the monk had before... The reveal was fantastic and floored everyone. One of my favorite moments from the campaign!
While I still feel as a player I wouldn't like this, that way of revealing things and them being able to remember once there is a trigger would be better. All the memes I've seen about it just seem a bit, mean spirited? Clunky? Too much focussed on tricking the players than them feeling something. With your steady clues they still get massive changes to their characters and motivations, especially the secret brother they forgot, but it's about their emotions, so it would be a lot more of a trigger to feel something.
The problem with the False Hydra is that it has an actual original creator who is NEVER CREDITED. Fr, can anyone in here actually tell me where the False Hydra originates from?!
I think the way you're supposed to move forward with it is in the Split Mind part. As they investigate the cursed town, they start finding notes that they don't remember writing. The implication is that rather than have them do something and then tell them they don't remember, you basically control their character during the part they aren't supposed to remember, then skip the scene at the table. One player goes to investigate a House but doesn't see anything so they come back and the other characters are confused why they were gone for 20 minutes if they didn't find anything, but the player only remembers being there for 2 minutes tops. Then they look down and see they're holding a note that says "RUN RUN RUN LEAVE TOWN RUN." Stuff like that.
That leaves the players completely bereft of agency. There is no meaningful choice to be made in such a situation. Like, it _reads_ cool and I'd watch a movie about it, but it makes for absolutely rancid roleplay.
@@ikaemosI ran it that way. You don't have to remove any player agency. You can give them false memories, what "actually happens" doesn't need to be played out. I had my players roll a save when the hydra took a pause in singing to eat and for the ones that saved, instead of telling them that they saw the hydra, I told them that they had a panic attack or became excruciatingly stressed out about something recent that had happened to them, leaving them obviously distressed to the rest of the party as well as themselves. This was the false memories that their brain had made up to fill in the blanks for whatever actually happened, not necessarily the thing that did happen. And then it's up to the players to figure out that there is a monster, what it does, and how to defeat it based on these and other clues you give them. You don't really have to take control of a character to pull off a false hydra, you can just not play out a scene, male fake memories and flight the players. Thankfully none of my player had heard about the false hydra and they loved it and were genuinely frightened at times.
@@victorjohansson6455 I'm fairly sure the "not playing a scene and making fake memories" IS the removed agency, because you have to decide what the players would have done in the moments of lucidity without them having a say in the matter. It's the same effect as just taking over and running a scene for them but without even the chance for them to cut you off and say they wouldn't do something in the middle. Sure some people will be fine with that, but they still definitely have no agency there
I interpreted the split mind as the players retaining control over half of their characters, with the other half unable to remember or describe what was seen. This way the players can still take whatever action they want, but they can't tell anyone about it. Frankly, it feels like a pretty boring way to handle memory gaps.
Honestly To run a false hydra well you have to remember one thing, characters can forget, but players cant. And a thing that links to that, players only know as much as their characters. You cant just tell a player 'ok, you dont remember the monster you encountered'. What you can do is say. Alright, so everyone goes to sleep in the tavern. You all later wake up in this abandoned building, there are signs of combat around you. If you are to look out of one of the windows you notice you are inside that old house you passed on your way to the tavern. You can have one of the smarter character roll some secret int check after they go to sleep to see if they keep clues for themselves once they wake up. Or like. 'You open the door into this abandoned building you want to investigate and see...the insides of the towns tavern. You look around yourself and find that you are indeed standing infront of the tavern instead of the house you were standing before just moments ago.' And so on and so forth. Once you tell the players that they forgot something, you break the illusion. They have to discover that they did on their own.
So, what exactly is the game there? Everything that might constitute gameplay in this kind of scenario (exploring locations, examining clues, interviewing witnesses, putting together a deduction, confronting the big bad) would occur in blackouts, since every memory relating to the hydra or anyone it ate is deleted. You better hope your characters can instinctively solve the problem off-screen while you go from blackout to blackout like severe narcoleptics.
@@ikaemos Where did you get the idea that it all always occurs during any plot important scene? This is how you start roping the *party* into the fact that they are forgetting things. After this, it’s NPCs that have blackouts. And you trickle feed clues with that
@@ikaemos Not everyting The point is they would only black out when encountering the Hydra, the blackout monster. the entire investigation is still there, just the parts where they would encounter, see with their own eyes, the hydra, arent. until the end, when they finally encounter it in the final battle.
The best way I’ve found to run a False Hydra is to leave clues to things the party has already forgotten rather than telling them they forgot something. For example, my favorite way to introduce the monster is to introduce the hook that someone in the party had dissapeared. Someone who never even had a player. One person in the party simply wakes up in a multi-bed room at an inn to find possessions that are not their own. It’s limiting in that you can’t have anyone the party encounter’s disappear to cause suspense, but that’s what makes the monster interesting. A lack of information is far scarier. Running it this way does undercut the song’s ability to cause complete forgetting of people, but it’s much better from a narrative and play perspective
I ran a False Hydra as a fully sentient villain in a mini-campaign I was running and I can confidently agree that it works better as a horror concept in an rpg than a statblock. Designing a whole game around a sentient aberration trying to overtake a town and leaving clues for the party made it much more interesting than throwing a statblock at the players and seeing what happened. Letting them explore an environment tailor made for the mystery of the false hydra was also way more fun and considerably less headache than putting it in your weekly game. Also has the added benefit of you letting you write discrepancies in the story from the start of it for the players to look sideways at all the while. Very fun concept, very challenging statblock but still highly recommend if you think you can handle running one.
I remember the first time I discovered this monster and was like "Hey, that would be neat to put in my campaign". The chance to actualy integrate it into campaing plot appeared only after like 3 years. And for all those three years I often "helped" a party - sometimes they were finding useful things seemengly out of nowhere - clear and fresh health potions in a long-forgotten dungeon, or the exact amount of gold left in a pocket, or convinient way of escape. I wrote down every single time I did this and then, when time finally came, I prepared a diary, filled with notes about group's adventure from the perspective of our monk's brother. According to his backstory, monk lost his brother in war long ago, but due to extreme alcoholism gaslighted himself into believing that brother was alive and lost somewhere. The diary revealed that his brother was with a group all along. He helped them as much as he could, giving potions, paying money etc. But party could not remember him. Not only characters - players themselves sould not remember him.
@@niscent_this! Their memories are false, they are their minds trying to fill in the blanks of what was forgotten. Play with this by making things weird and don't give the players too much meta knowledge.
A neat trick is not describing or hand-waving stuff that the false hydra made disappear. When describing stuff, you never tell all the details, that would be impossible or boring. You only describe the important stuff. And sometimes players might miss an information or two. But if you don’t give an information and focus them on something more important, it’s like a magic trick. They will themselves as player fill out the missing details in their head, and when they discover the twist, realize you actually never lied to them. Just omitted some information.
I don't think it can affect players, or if it did, you wouldn't know. You can't make the players forget things, you have to make them find things they should already know.
I came across the idea for a false hydra and had an idea for my group. They are all newer players so I've made things easier or fudged rolls early on to give them a chance to understand rules without getting to worked up over a player death, but I've recently told them I'll start playing it more straight since they are more comfortable with the rules. Without telling them, I've kept notes since they started the campaign on what they have done, little conversations or interactions they have had, or times I fudged rolls for them. I wrote up a diary from the perspective of a 5th member, talking about what they have been through and putting in little notes about how they helped (the fudged rolls) or inside jokes they were a part of. I wanted to make it personal so they felt tied to the character when they read it, and also as a reminder of all their adventures so far. Then I set up a scenario where they would visit a town, wake up the next morning and find a backpack with all of these items related to adventures or personal stories and the diary. The players would find out info the same way their characters did, with no prior knowledge of this 5th member. I hoped they would have questions and fight the hydra, partly to see if what they found was real and partly to help the town. It wouldn't be a difficult fight, but more just an impactful narrative device, which I think it the best way to use the false hydra, with a few mechanical tweaks so it doesn't get frustrating. Unfortunately, two sessions before they would have gone to the town my computer completely died, and I lost everything I had done in Foundry. I ended up scrapping the plot line, but I still think it would be cool to try out. It's a lot of work, and not every monster works well with every campaign or party, but if it sounds interesting it could be fun to try it at least once.
The false hydra can work well if you DM in a way where you pretend like the players already fought the FH and wake up with the aftermath. For example, the FH can split the minds of players, and the left side remembers and tries to communicate it to the rest of the body. You can have your party go into a town, sleep, and wake up with markings on their chests about the FH. That way, the players will feel like their characters slowly discovering the false hydra. Half the battle is knowing it exists. Again, it's very high concept and difficult to finesse in a campaign, but if done right it would be incredible.
The best way to make the concept work is to randomly drop things onto the party like they already had it. Items in pouches that they didn't have before, the other commenter pretending like there was an extra party member, notes they don't remember writing. Don't undo details, make up new ones that they don't "remember" the origins of. It makes the experience a bit easier to play out. Though the False Hydra could definitely use a more nuanced "how you counter it," like a person trying to intentionally remember something can roll a wisdom check or something.
You counter a false hydra with a silence spell. (Or wax earplugs) If you can give a silence scroll to your players in a previous adventure it can be a nice setup.
The real way to run a False Hydra is to instead run a group of bandits with a wizard using Modify Memory pretending to be a False Hydra. I ran this and the final battle was great because they got all ready, cotton in the ears and everything, but found a middle aged man hiding in a hallowed out tree casting Modify Memory and some bandits in a poorly made False Hydra costume.
I ran a mini-adventure with two players online that was a false hydra mystery. I agree, it works really well as a standalone. It actually went really well and the players had a lot of fun. I don't remember what version of the false hydra I used but I know I still have all the docs somewhere. I randomized NPC deaths at night or if players were out of the town long enough. That lead to a really sad NPC disappearance and her husband played a big roll in helping the town remember and the false hydra down. Also, if you run a false hydra, big recommend to randomize some possible effects on the NPCs if a player pushes them on the existence of a character they don't remember (like nose bleeds, or crying without noticing, or a full on panic attack). I made it to where the false hydra did entirely erase the memory of a person, but only if someone was under its spell. So my players were invited by the mayor who they met previously, but when they got there the town's people all thought they didn't have a mayor. I also had players roll wisdom saving throws to see if they remembered characters they had previously met in the town that vanished.
The original Goblin Punch article goes into more detail about how to actually use it, a bit the 5e stat block doesn’t go into is how it can brainwash entire towns of people into its mind slaves to go and bring more people to it.
It's like, running a False Hydra is almost like a paradox: The premise and concept really make it seem like a monster geared toward setting up a creepy and unsettling mystery - but the moment the player characters start forgetting stuff, a lot of players who don't know what's going on would start getting frustrated really quickly. The obvious solution would be to not make the characters forget anything, and only have NPCs forgetting and disappearing, but that's pretty much the False Hydra's entire kit - unless you make some substantial changes, if the PCs actually encounter one of the heads, it doesn't have a whole lot going for it. On the other hand, a roleplay-heavy group that's aware of what a False Hydra is would be more likely to play into the whole "forgetting" angle, but it completely destroys the mystery if any of them know that it's a monster that's causing the disappearances and memory gaps.
the trick is to not make the characters forget things that the players would need to act on, but to make them forget things that you as a dm can act on. forgetting the existence of a guy is a big ask to your players. but just never letting them notice the guy is missing, or systematically failing to find the guy because they forgot his face, is a much simpler thing that works pretty close to the same.
The trick to make the parts when the false hydra erases player memories not frustrating is to make them actually hints as how the monster works. « As Gorgash goes to investigate the other Room alone, you hear a scream in his voice. When you open the door, you see him standing, blade in hand, ready to fight, blood running on him arm from a fresh wound. Gorgash, juste give me your character sheet for a second ? » *erases a few hit points* If you can sneakily add stuff to their character sheet during a break, it’s also a good way to have that « wtf » moment but in a satisfying way. When the orphan character who’s been using magic shoes since the beginning of the adventure finds a letter in their pocket saying « I hope you like the shoes. Happy Birthday. Dad » now they have clues, feels, and a mind blown.
The way you do the "forgetting" part is by presenting your players with more stuff and clues, not less and less. You don't describe seeing a distorted face in the window and then forgetting it immediately, instead in the morning a player finds a note on their bedside table with scribblings and illustrations seemingly written in blood. Then the player realises their hand hurts, and discovers jab wounds on their palm similar to stabbing it with a quill or pen. You as the DM have to have it all figured out, building a bigger picture the party could have experienced already but cannot remember. Then just feed a bit at a time from that bloated well of experiences your players have "never" heard or seen before.
A lot of what you can do with a False Hydra, can also be accomplished with a particularly nefarious Night Hag. If I was to use on in a campaign, I’d probably have the two of them working together. Would make for a scary pet.
I will mention a DM I still play with has successfully inserted the False Hydra into a running campaign, by the end half of us knew what was happening, but the other half not knowing kinda made RPing it better? What made it work better in our game is we had a person with amnesia which played into them hearing the song somewhat normally as sort of a Mind Blank spell. The fun for the rest of the party came from the mystery itself really, you just need to make the combat more interesting than "go kill it without any trouble". In our game, the problem we had to overcome in combat is that we couldn't see the False Hydra due to the song, so when the person that could hear it saw the monster, he had to improvise on what we should do. Now obviously there's a problem where the person that knows what's going on, or at least has figured out the song part of the mystery, can just be like "let's go buy ear-muffs or whatever", but if the players understand the idea, they would have to walk around with fingers in their ears the whole time or they would forget about things related to the hydra, including the song. If you stick a Silence on the group, they can see everything, but casting spells is a problem. You need to think of a believable way to avoid this problem which is the hardest part about it if you have players that just want to get to the end. The other problem mentioned with the heads following someone in the party is not that hard to accomplish I dont think, you just set up the party members coming to the city with "NPCs" of other adventurers, but some or all of them die without the players knowing until they solve the song issue. If its a oneshot maybe ask each player to make 2 characters if they can, or link it back to their backstory. *The party are the survivors, not just the arrivals* Either find players which will play into the monster idea and collude with them to make it believable or dont put yourself into a situation where they have to retroactively forget something, only actively. Like if you're following a criminal, maybe they just disappear as an illusion instead of being eaten in front of them and then having to play out the forgetting part.
My impression of it was that it only makes people forget about those that it eats. It's not going to just make your players forget about a party member that still exists and is standing right there. It is going to lure someone away from the group, wait until they are alone and then eat them, then sing its song and cause everyone to forget that person existed. A way to run this would be to have your players come into a town where a False Hydra is and it seems to be a pretty peaceful town, but there's one guy, one dude who can resist the song because he's deaf or for some other reason and all the villagers are like "Oh that's just Crazy Steve, he keeps freaking out for some reason." And he just seems like a raving madman or something. Then the party starts to maybe do quests in the town, some small side-stuff and as they keep adventuring people start coming up missing. There are sections of missing time, like it might be two days later than they thought it was at some point. There's just big gaps in their memory, getting bigger as they stay in town. All of a sudden, Crazy Steve is starting to make sense.
It's always funny to see people make random homebrew damage types because you know they're just trying to get around common resistances lmao like dude just commit some characters/creatures should and will be stronger against an enemy than another you don't have to pretend "sonic" damage isn't just thunder damage lmao
@@ShadowChief117 "Sonic" was a damage type in at least 3.5e, so it's likely the author of this one migrated to 5e and it's just a holdover in their mind. But yes, sonic damage would equate to thunder in 5e.
@@ShadowChief117to be fair, thunder isn’t exactly the most sensible damage type itself. Most of them make sense: bludgeoning, slashing and piercing are taken from the real world, and fire, cold, lightning, acid, psychic, and poison damage are general pop culture/fantasy things, radiant and necrotic represent like good and evil or light and darkness. Force is just kind of a catch-all to prevent immunities and resistances, and then there’s thunder, which feels super out of place because it really should just be under bludgeoning damage like fall damage is, but it feels like the original creator just wanted a more thematic damage type and not have people immune to bludgeoning also be immune to thunder.
@@ShadowChief117 Nah, the creator's probably just getting mixed up with 3.5 edition rules, where Sonic is one of the 5 types of energy damage. You can see that they make a couple references to "move actions" in the statblock, which is also an older edition thing that was phased out in 5e.
I do like the split mind idea, it seems to be based off of the bicameral mind. The idea that the brain is split into the left and right sides that effect different functions in your body, thought writing etc. Its even been observed in real life by people who have had the two hemispheres of their brain surgically seperated. Granted based on more recent science it isnt 100% sound as not every function of your brain can be split right down the middle. But its neat
Some people lose the ability to speak normally, but retain the ability to sing. Still think and feel the same things, but for a time you have to sing your thoughts instead of speaking them, though also the human brain has a lot of neuroplasticity and whatever remains intact will eventually reroute itself into a more normal set of functions. There's also longstanding myths that because of this brain divide, you can't read text in your dreams. May be true for some people, just as apparently some people dream in black and white instead of full color. I most certainly can read text in my dreams, but lack object permanence - as soon as an item or place is out of my line of sight, it either stops existing or transforms into something else, and the glyphs in a passage of text may scramble or change to random squiggles or letters from languages I don't read or change to completely different, but still legible text.
My solution has been to add that creatures which have been exposed to certain obscure magic (which of course the party has encountered) have a partial immunity to the mindsong such that they can remember enough to be able to continue investigating, e.g. they can faintly hear the song in the distance of the town, or they get a save against the mindsong that lets them see the false hydra without forgetting it for 24 hours
I actually ran the false hydra for an interlude in my campaign around Halloween. We had lost a player who quit for an unimportant reason, but I kept saying that NPC’s and such kept saying the five of you, and played it off like I had written a script well in advance and just kept mistakenly saying it. Cut to a few weeks later, and they get letters from a friend from a town that align with the typical false hydra narrative. We had a ton of fun, discovering that they had in fact been a party of five the whole time, I think the false hydra would be a poor villain for a whole campaign, but for two sessions near Halloween, it was very fitting. Plus I got to try my hand at writing some horror stuff, which was fun. All in all, I do get why it’s so highly rated, because when it works, it works really well.
Yeah the False Hydra’s biggest weakness is how well known it is. The only way I was ever able to get away with one was by making a twist where the False Hydra was just another level of evolution of the Oblex.
If I were to ever do this, it would be to transition a party from “easy mode” with a bunch of health potions everywhere and reveal there was a healer in the party that got eaten by the hydra
Reading through, I think you do a real good mindfuck (this does require a party to be pretty good with dark themes ofc). Someone had suggested that a painter approaches the party and asks them if they want a portrait done of the party, the party agrees and they are told 'it will be very detailed come back in a few months and it'll be ready'. The players then go off and adventure. Run them through a few adventures and quests. After every return to town they find some free swag at the inn they are staying at. Sometimes in the form of you find some extra gear next to yours in your room. Or 'as you are leaving the barkeep hands you some stuff, he thinks one of you dropped it last night' it contains some odds and ends, and a couple nice little magical items (nothing too crazy unless you're going for a really powerful game), but stuff they might enjoy and won't turn down after they check to make sure it isn't cursed. A +1 sword, a cloak of Elvenkind, boots of haste, etc. The trick is while on the adventures try and give a couple spots that feel suspiciously easy alongside some unseen help. The evil goblin tribe leader is distracted by something they can't see. In the middle of a big fight with orcs several bow shots fly from nearby and get a couple nice hits. They are about to attack a bandit camp and suddenly a power keg explodes on the other side and gives them the distraction to move in for a surprise attack. Maybe for some reason the right hand man of a minor BEG goes down after 1 or 2 hits (receiving even less damage than a normal grunt they fought to get to the room) While travelling they randomly have advantage on a couple rolls as if they were getting help (maybe for finding the path through a thicket, maybe looking for a magical relic in a tomb). And whatever else you can think of, maybe going with your idea of randomly they find an extra health potion or three in their pack or after a gruelling fight they find some weirdly spaced health potions on a table that they hadn't seen as the fight started. Later when they get the painting it is the party but with 3-4 other people (obviously the kicker being with the gear that they 'dropped' or found at the inn). Pair this with a book describing their adventures written by one of the 'previous' group members starts pretty normal (though obviously totally alien to them because it lists multiple other people being part of all their adventures, it was super cool how Treda managed to bullrush the BEGs right hand man and give him a good few smacks to soften him up for the PC barbarian to take him down with one mighty cleave!) and have it end abruptly. The writer decided to re-read the book and realized that they have written about several people they don't know, they know the party, they are RIGHT HERE, but these other people, who are they, why does their brain hurt, they have to warn their friends, they have to tell them that something weird is going on and that is the final entry. That sudden meta knowledge drop of 'you guys have had 4 other party members fighting alongside you, you were friends with, helped you out are not only dead, but you can't even remember you travelled with them' should be a good punch to the belly button. Sort of reminds me of John Dies at the End, the main character realizes that they had something similar happen, when the shadow people kill his friends they didn't just kill them, but wiped them from time and space. The main character can recall the most minor figments of them, how they helped along the adventure, but when they were wiped out of existence they simply faded from the worlds collective memory and now only exist as a name and a ghost of a face.
I still remember one of my better con jokes, where I saw someone dressed as The Silence, and asked the guy at the booth I was buying from what the character was. He explained it was a Dr Who villain, I said cool, kept looking at his stuff, then looked over my shoulder at the guy dressed as The Silence and asked the guy at the booth what that character was. I guess I had a pretty good poker face because he did a triple take before he laughed.
I ran a False Hydra once. It was being used by a massive prison the size of a city to spirit away individuals to be metaphysically crushed into Warforged cores. The entire point was that it kept the prisoners placid as they continued to do their forced labor all the while they kept losing the people that they may form any sort of bonds with. And the party loved it because I kinda said "Well, there's a bunch of circumstances that make this strange, so basically you only forget *what happens while you can see the False Hydra* which is how the stat block seems to read". As such, they were able to put together bits and pieces like "Oh, I remember talking to a person that isn't here anymore" or "Oh something is wrong with my friend who was just yelling about a monster and now it's not there". Basically, use the False Hydra as a hit-and-run style of monster, where it focuses one party member and *that party member alone* forgets it, not everyone else. This combined with the other plot stuff going on at the prison combined to make a really fun mystery of why the prison was doing what it was doing and how to stop a monster that seemed ingrained in the entire city-sized area. And to do this they decided to take the thing out at the root, as for all intents and purposes the False Hydra is just a really big, really dangerous plant. They had the wizard's familiar turn into a monkey, used a bunch of beads of water prepared using dust of dryness (which basically amounted to a large 6-foot deep pond of water), stuck a bomb on there, and let the familiar get eaten. It blew up, the water expanded, the False Hydra exploded from the water pressure, and everyone got their memories back.
My DM ran the false hydra in a way that was actually really cool imo. As we tried to figure out what was going on, we’d wake up and find an extra backpack at our camp or letters on our persons from a mysterious author. Upon killing the hydra, our DM revealed that our party had actually had a bard (for 20+ sessions) that we all didn’t know existed because the hydra ate them. I thought this was really well done since we as players genuinely had no memory of the bard, making it so we didn’t have to gaslight ourselves. Overall sick part of our campaign!
I used my own statblocks when I ran a False Hydra. (I only had the base concept at the time.) I made separate statblocks for the body, heads, & claws. They also went on separate initiative counts and had their own Actions. I based a lot of the mechanics for the fight itself on the Dead Hand from Ocarina of Time, but with more heads & longer necks & a song tossed in with a saving throw. (Slashing, piercing, & psychic damage types, not "sonic", which was the 3.5e version of thunder). The heads can Bite, and can screech when hurt, and the body makes claws pop up out of the ground, which then attack on their turns. (Maximum claws = current head count.) The body's HP is high, but damaging heads & claws also damages the body, which is its "real" hp, but it means an area attack can damage it multiple times. Weakest head regens 20 on the body's turn, & a downed head won't grow back until 60. My version of the song: Mind Altering Song (Aura hearing range, at the starts of your turns): Charm - Wis save (15) or forget hydra is present. -1d4 to your roll per additional head if in multiple heads' auras. Advantage if you've figured it out. Immune if deafened. When it came to player interactions... I simply didn't have anyone the real players interacted with get eaten, so I never had to gaslight them about their actual experiences. I did, however, have an extra bag of adventuring gear be in their room when they woke up, implying the existence of a party member they have no recollection of (& acting as a way to give the party some loot partway through their search). In the journal for this unknown person were tales of the party's adventure, through the POV of someone who'd never been there as far as they knew... (And reading a few choice scenes corrected a few impossible feats from early in the game when we didn't know the rules well enough yet & made some calls that wouldn't've actually worked with the game's rules.) I gave this party member a name based on something that the players misremembered the name of at some point a while back, so there would be a really faint hint of familiarity, but nothing attached to it. There were also other weirdnesses in town (before the party showed up): * The inn was named with two nicknames, but only one of these names applies to the owner * There's a room in the inn that he never rents out & doesn't know why (full of baby furniture) * The town voted to not have a mayor anymore over a decade ago * There's a karen that finds it cathartic to show up to the empty mayoral office each day to shout her grievances * The general store had always run on an honor system that no one had ever challenged * There's a boy who was born without parents, who's going to inherit that store when he turns 16, and everyone just accepts this as normal. (He lives by himself, but his aunt checks in on him regularly.) * The imprisoned beggar who's been shouting about some kind of monster and there being missing people (he's deaf & was imprisoned for causing disturbances, claiming that there used to be twice as many people in this town) This was one of the PC's hometown, but he never checked in on his family. (They're fine & safe.) He remembered orc raiders being an issue though, something no one else seemed to remember. The party found the orc settlement nearby & it was completely empty. We rotate DMs, so my character wasn't with the party for this adventure... It was thousands of miles away... So when I handed the campaign to the next DM, my character rejoined the party and asked them about the now missing party member that I had basically retconned in.
Ive always thought the idea of a false hydra haunting one person would be cool, kind of like gavins friend from RDR2; like he starts off as a one-off character looking for his brother, then the next time hes looking for his brother and his wife, and so on and so forth until someone notices a creature in the forest of a multi-headed monster revelling in this persons pain
In the video at 13:24 you were confused about whether the false hydra is pretending to be the husband. The false hydra deletes all the memories of the person it consumed (they don't eat it slowly over a long time, they grab the person and eat them immediately. Not stalk them or follow them). Nobody remembers that person ever existed at all because they have been consumed. The items of clothing belonged to the husband and the woman finding them is confused because there are clothes there from a man and no man has ever lived with them as far as they can remember.
Honestly, i still love the False Hydra because it really does feel like you can mold it any way that you want to fit and alter your homebrew world. Case in point, my version of the false hydra was formed when a maddened artificer from millenia past took the flesh of the Far realms and tried to mold it to male puppets unseen by the gods. But beyond that, i made two alterations to allow for more dynamic storytelling: Those that have natural psionic abilities are resistant to the Hydras song and can still remember it, and those who share flesh with it are also resistant, being Changelings. Three of my eight players have this trait unknowingly, and thus it adds an extra mystery of "why can WE see it when the others cannot?"
The false hydra is an incredible horror monster, but as a monster in an rpg it falls short because the intended mechanics have no weaknesses. In order for the false hydra to work as an rpg monster the concept of what the memory wipe abilities do would need to be changed and have more weaknesses. I like the idea of giving it an at will (or maybe even 3/Day) Suggestion or Charm Person or something (instead of dominate monster) and creatures charmed by it can see it and become immune to the memory wipe ability for a period of time in case they manage to break the charm before being consumed. Even this concept has some issues but I think this alleviates some of the problems with the disruptive nature of the memory wipe at the table with more recourse to counter the hydra attempting to kill a player.
The intended mechanic does have weaknesses but it relies on the players figuring out what’s going on. Since the song is sound based spells such as silence, items like wax earplugs, actions like submerging yourself in water or really anything that stops noise straight up stops the effects of the song and can give the player a window as a counter. Though mostly I see the false hydra as more so a narrative pice rather than a boss monster to throw at the players, like a lot of horror monsters in ttrpgs
15:29 I kinda do wanna comment on this particular part of the video. I personally feel like that is NOT a problem with the monster itself, but a problem with players metagaming. Like, the player themselves may know about the false hydra, but how does the character know? Seeing as the False Hydra is supposed to be a creature whose gimmick is causing people to forget that it exists and it's very existence is debated amongst scholars to actually exist, I feel like identifying the memory gaps as evidence of a False Hydra would be like a DC 30 Arcana check, with failures leading players into false answers (like "this looks like some sort of memory modification spell"), and that might not even tell you how the creature even does the memory alteration, more so that you have simply heard of such a creature. Therefore it is extremely unlikely that the party will learn to just "cover their ears" unless they are metagaming.
But then you run into the opposite issue, if the false hydra is so rare that none of the PCs know anything about it, how do they do anything about it? Certainly you could have them find notes (maybe even notes they personally wrote) giving them clues, but that's just you the DM handing them info. That's the real issue, you can find all the letters from people you don't know, extra gear, and unexpected spare bedrolls you want but until you know about the song you can't actually act on anything in a meaningful way. And once you know how to deal with the song any detective work you did prior is redundant because you now "remember"
Here are my feelings about the false hydra, as a DM who has run the false hydra for my players. Its not a monster that you can run like you do a dragon or a goblin. It's more of a story piece, if you put a false hydra into your game, DO NOT let your players see or know about the hydra until you intend for them to fight it. If you do let them see it you'll end up having to do what Jacob did in ice-wind dale and just tell the players to pretend they don't know it's there. So what you should do is hint at a false hydra to your players by having inconsistencies in your narrative. This requires more time and planning so it's not for newer DMs or those who struggle with improv. Have the players enter a town, and drop some clues that there are missing people, say there is a great big Church in the middle of town, but no cleric ever gives sermons, or maybe the town has a keep, but its throne always stays empty. Once you feel that you've dropped enough clues its time for the false hydra to attack the players, once it does so it can't be singing and so can be seen. hope this helps people. TLDR the false hydra is a story, not a monster, and using one requires a different DMing approach.
The False Hydra feels like it can be useful as something to throw on the side, just gotta give it a lot less focus. You get a quest to rescue a man from a dungeon from a woman in town, perhaps the woman, lets say their name is "Ivory" has some kind of helpful knowledge about the BBEG they want to keep under lock in key. You do that, and as you come back to the town to collect your reward, you cannot find her, you ask around and they're like "who is Ivory?" There's another explanation here, a woman with that kind of knowledge is someone the BBEG might want disposed of. But in actuality, she was just devoured by a False Hydra. You can do stuff like that with a False Hydra and not have it dominate the game, just having it exist to make fighting the BBEG inconvenient, the works of some outside entity minding its own business that just strangely coincides with making the parties job harder.
The empty throne is such a cool idea. I’ll remember it if i ever do a false hydra style monster ever again. « Why is the throne empty ? » « I dunno, the last king had no heir, and nobody wanted to take the job, i guess ? »
@@ShadeKirby500 Yeah, I think Jacob was right when he said that the adventure would have to be built around the false hydra. That's what I meant when I called it a story piece as opposed to a monster.
False Hydra's are a good side story in your campaign. After returning from a long adventure to the main hub and some strange things have been happening since you left, and you tend to a session and a half on it. It's never going to be a main villain or something but a sub plot villain... sure.
I ran a false hydra in my party. It takes the right type of players. I luckily have players where if i tell them they dont notice something then they act as if their character doesnt see anything and role plays on withiut metagaming. The way I played the hydra is that they came to a village with a much smaller population compared to the number of houses. They met a few NPCs, one of which was a bartender at the tavern. The next day, they went back to the tavern, and there was no bartender, and all of the people in the bar said they've never had a bartender. I told my players that they never met a bartender there, and they roleplayed like they hadn't. They met an NPC with the words "dont forget" carved on their arm when they woke up that morning with no recollection on where it came from. Eventually, they found a secret passage with some corpses with cotton stuffed in their ears as a clue that they need to block their hearing. I made them roll a wisdom save, which one player passed. I asked all of the other players to leave the room and described the false hydra to the lone player. They were able to convince the other players about the monster, and they fought the hydra having to pass a widsom save each turn or forgetting the false hydra was even there. It was one of our favorite sessions in the 3 years we have been playing together.
Its a mystery. You never tell the player something and later say they have now "forgotten it" you explain things from the perspective that they have already forgotten them. Like they are walking around the town at night hearing weird sounds and suddenly its night time and they are on the other side of the town with hp missing, spell slots used, covered in blood and grime. They clearly have just been in a battle but they don't remember it. That's how you explain it to them. You can't break the illusion, you have to let the players figure out something is messing with their memories. Or they wake up in the room they rented in the inn and there is an extra bed with adventurer's gear on it and a weapon and clothes etc and it just appeared and none of them remember it being there and they have to figure out how that's possible, it's because they had an extra party member all this time but it got eaten by the hydra and now they don't remember ever having had a nother party member. But you as DM tell it from that perspective so they experience it as if they IRL have "forgotten". It's great fun but you have to do it this way to not break the illusion. Of course you dont tell them something they forget, that would't make any sense, thats the whole point.
i had a GM use this as the twist villain for a murder mystery in a snowed in manor. it was really slick. There was a whole cast of NPC's he introduced and physical notes he passed out every session, that he quickly reduced as we went along. the premise is we were trapped in this manor on a mountain pass during a blizzard and so the GM played blizzard sound effects from his computer - and everytime the False Hydra killed someone he'd stop the music - its something we organically realized was intentionally only 2 or 3 sessions in. Those notes he passed out changed every session to adapt to what NPCs we had left, and he grinned every second he gaslight us about some critical NPC who just up an vanished. it was very good, but in part i think because no one at the table knew what a false hydra was and so it just never clicked what was happening until the end.
I thought the idea of a False Hydra was that anybody it eats has all memory of them deleted from the people who hear its song, and its song also causes anyone who hears it to forget seeing the Hydra. So like, as soon as you stop looking at it, you immediately forget it was there. So you'd find pictures of a loved one you have no memory of, their clothes and other possessions in your house, and have no idea how they got there or who this person is, etc.
I ran this once, and honestly its something i had to plan on very early, practically from session 0. Party had no class with healing, one of them (artificer) only mentioned their mother in their backstory, and when asked said he never knew his father. Another (rogue) held a strong importance on family, and hooked the hydra in to those 3 things The party had to go to the artificer's home village to find an artifact their mother was working on before she died. Ended up finding evidence of his father having lived there, and was actually the one who taught him everything, not his mother. When the party woke up, they found an extra bag in the room, and the notetaker found a message in their journal "Melora help her, its eating her!" In the bag they found a journal detailing their adventure, and early passages wrote of her's and rogue's escape from the cult thar murdered their family. I the handed them a real locket with some art my friend made, of the rogue as a child with a younger girl. The warlock contacted their patron and they learned of the existence of a "creature that devours the memory of their victim" and they realized what I had done to them for the last year and a half irl The players had never heard of a false hydra, and we're close friends, we trust each other not to be dicks, so they didn't mind the slight rewrites to their backstory. That being said, your mileage may vary, and not everyone will react the same way
15:35 a good thing to do is you have an entire town affected by a small false hydra that can’t affect high level adventures and then make them get a quest such as go kill this and then when they come back have the villagers say something along the lines of we haven’t had a mayor for many years
I have one in a game I've been running for a couple of months. The party's boat got damaged and the only port available was one that nobody was sure was running or not. People when asked about the port simply had no memory of anybody who was from there so assumed it was abandoned. The way I played it was if a person was eaten by the hydra you forgot they existed and you forgot of the hydra itself as long as it sang. Functionally this meant as it bit the players they would find themselves hurt and I would make up a story about how it happened, like tripping over a chair or onto a piece of broken fence. One of the players actually had the spell shield, and I burned the reaction as the wizard would have cast the spell to not get bit, and the players got spooked by the wizard randomly casting shield with no combat. I killed a few crew members and actually went into the player who takes note's bio and removed (temporarily) the mention of them and added new ones that got killed overnight while they were forced to try to sleep before repairs could finish, wakening up randomly to screams of victims they couldn't remember hearing. So the left. :( They said, "this shit's too spooky" and left and put up warning signs, planning to come back when they're "like level 18 and can fart angels and kill gods". I do not blame them for this.
I would rule that the closer you are to the person who is forgotten, the sooner you forget them. So the players can notice something going on and give clues. For example, the husband of the woman is eaten. She remembers nothing about him and is confused about the clothes in her house. The players who met them both yesterday remember she had a husband but can't remember what he looked like. Causing the players to ask more questions and search more.
I actually ran it as a pseudo-side quest for the main quest of a campaign I ran a few years ago. The players figured it out because when they were deafened (such as when the air genasi used warding wind, or the artificer plugged her ears when planting an explosive) they remembered everything. Then, of course, when they took them out they forgot, but that's when I made the "split mind" thing happen. It was the split mind aspect, the notes and warnings that eventually lead them to finding and slaying the hydra. It was a lot of fun, though it did get way darker than I was anticipating with one of the players trying to permanently deafen themselves and other... things happening. But overall it was a pretty successful horror encoutner to t-up a short Underdark adventure. Though it was difficult to run, definitely not for new DMs or impatient groups.
I ran a false hydra one-shot for some very veteran (like AD&D veterans) and everyone loved it. It was also the hardest game I’ve ever run and felt like it was on the edge of completely falling apart meta-wise at any moment, especially because at least one of the players had heard of the false hydra before. Basically, I got lucky. It was awesome, but very difficult to pull off.
False hydra would be great for a hub town that your party always visits but never stays at for long. The bonds the party should be making with the villagers not sticking and people never remembering them could lead to the adventure as something building up in the background of the main campaign.
I tried to run this monster for a one shot. My players walked in to the main gate of town and spent an hour looking at a wall in an alley. I tried to suggest to them that they should ask the townspeople about what was going on to get more clues. They went to a bar, and a servant of the mayor asked them for help with calming down the mayor because he was freaking out and behaving oddly. After arriving at the mayor's home, two of the players forgot about the man who brought them there to begin with. I thought this was going to be a really cool reveal when they finally figured out it was a big monster making everyone forget people. We took a bathroom break, and when I came back there was only one person left on Zoom and he said I should DM a full campaign because this was too slow, then he logged off too. Almost quit DMing after that.
Sounds like those players just sucked. Like they didn't even try to engage with the story at all, and they just wanted a big thing to hit for the next few hours. Don't pay them any mind. Nothing you would have done could have stopped them from dropping out. The only way they'd be happy is you dropped them into mid combat and that's it. Hope you're doing better with a better DND group.
It didnt help that they were drinking the whole time too. But I took the advice and started DMing a campaign and about 2 years later its still going weekly although I did take a long break. Every failure is a lesson.
@@xolotltolox7626 No, they just weren't good in general, chugging alcohol will ruin a game, especially if your entire party is doing it, it shows that they don't value your time, nor do they value the effort and skill that went into the game. It's as simple as that. Also, barring the drinks, dropping a game mid play during break without even talking with the DM is a shitty thing to do anyway. It's childish and rude, they wouldn't be a good fit with anyone at all. Stop trying to be devil's advocate when it's clearly not necessary. I hope you have a good day.
I feel like this is one of those cases where people are a little too focused on the technical category over gameplay influence. The thinking is “It’s a monster, monsters have stat blocks, therefore it is a statblock”, when the fact that it is a monster does not exclude it from being an adventure module
When I ran it, this turned into my player's favourite and most memorable arc of the campaign. I did tell them ahead of time "OK, look, the next arc requires you to RP, dive into your characters completely and NOT metagame". And they rolled with it. What I did with the whole "forgetting it" was, well, gaslightling, sure. When they were investigating something I would tell them "OK, Player1 you realise you are standing in a slightly different place than you thought you were. You also notice you are holding your sword out...and you are covered in specs of blood...also, you took 12 damage and Player2, you are missing 1 of your level 1 spell slots". Or when they asked me "Hey, could we go speak with the innkeeper of that second inn again?" I would say "You saw a second inn in this town, but it was boarded up. And you have no recollection of ever seeing or speaking with the innkeeper of that place". And refuse to elaborate. The part that really stuck with them and they remember to this day is: when they realised something was happening to their memories, they started taking notes in their in-game journals. And before the long rest they wrote down everyone's names and short descriptions. When they read it in the morning, I told them they see in the middle of the list a name and description of a dwarf barbarian there. They, as players, obviously knew they didn't lose anyone, so the WTF factor went through the roof at that point. And then NPCs throughout the campaign (that were outside the FH song at the moment of the dwarves death) would ask them "Hey, where is that cheerful dwarf you had with you?" and reminded them about that moment. It's a cool monster to have just random information added into the conversation and pretend it was always there. So gaslighting for sure, but, at least at my table, it was fun for everyone involved. What I think sucks about False Hydra is that it's a one-off monster. I don't think it can be as impactful of a story arc second time around. First time - it hits like a truck. Players have no ideas themselves and "WTF?!" keeps flying around the table. But if you were to run it a second time for the same people it would be more of a "Oh...right...erm...GeEeE I wOnDeR wHaT tHiS iS...". And even if they can RP ignorance, it's just not the same when the players know what is happening.
I ran a False Hydra arc in my sci-fi campaign where it infested a space station, but the way I did it is that the Hydra wasn't the only thing there; it was planted there by something else and that was the vector I used to feed clues to my players. One of them caught on to what it was pretty quick, but kept their silence because most of my players had never seen one before. In the end, I think they had fun with it, but as soon as the mystery was solved it was a lackluster fight and I probably won't do one again unless it's a low-level one-shot.
I played in a one shot where none of the players had heard of the false hydra before playing. DM did an amazing job of building tension and confusion. Stuff like all the villagers insisting that while the town had multiple blacksmiths workshops they didn't have an actual blacksmith and never had.
My understanding of the False Hydra, is it's song hides it's perception to the people who hear it, and whomever is eaten by the hydra, is where the memory loss comes into play. The song would work like a form of hypnosis kind, and the person who gets eaten will be forgotten.
I feel the solution would be for the DM to simply not create actual encounters until the players figure it out. You can end one session in one spot, then start the next session with the party in a completely different location and not know how they got there. Sure the players can retrace their steps and find more clues, but when they get back to where they left off in that previous session, they ultimately find nothing. You could even do this as a one on one basis. A player could be off on their own doing their own research and then the next thing they know they wake up the next morning with no memory of what happened. The best way for players to role play not knowing what's going on is by having them not know what's going on.
I got to play against one once and it actually was really fun. The way it worked was the memory shenanigans happened when the party was out of town for the most part. obviously we entered town, iddn't notice the thing, but there were a couple times where we might have seena strange shape in a reflection, or od tracks on the ground, or some small subtlties, but we were in the middle of an entirely different mission and just thought the town was weird. THEN, we started noticing people disappearing. and we accidentally fell in a tunnel close to the road surface between our base town and hydra town. stuff started piling up that wasn't making sense, like the local lord remembering we did something for him to like us but forgot entirely we rescued his son, because his son "didn't exist" anymore. so by that point I meta figured it out but the rest of my party had never heard of this creature before so I kept it under wraps. but by the time we fought the thing it was the big beefy boi and damn, it was hard. What made it hard was during the fight it would use its song and only one of us was passing each time, so we were basically taking turns on it each round, it was a lot of fun though and I got to really let loose with my artificer armorer, went full thundercrash titan on it.
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Idk, I know that in a lot of cases the False Hydra is really hard to use properly, but I do really love the aspect of it in that it is a kinda “mystery/horror” type monster. Most large and above monsters in DND (dragons, krakens, the Tarrasque) are big and boisterous, and slam or claw or burn you, and are well known, obvious, and feared in the areas they reside in But the false hydra? Its subtle, manipulative… it is cautious and elusive, it is an unknown horror than many that are killed by it never even see or know exists. Its a silent murderous leveaithan, lurkning just below the feet of its future victims… (Im also just a little biased because I dont know if its just me, but Ive seen people all around the internet constantly talk about how it’s impossible to run’ and ‘sucks as a concept’ and is just a ‘way to feel smarter than your players’. Ok? Thats your opinion, but they act is if it is impossible to edit or make interesting. Idk, I just think its kinda lame to be an asshole and tell people they can’t run something or that they’d suck as a dm for trying to run something. I’d honestly like to see someone make an attempt to make their own homebrew false hydra and see if they can keep the main horror, memory altering vibe while editing how it works and making work the way they want it to.)
The False Hydra concept sounds very similar to the spirit whale arc in Re:Zero. Also, split brain phenomona is a real thing and pretty cool if you look into it. I could easily see good DMs and story tellers use this as an interesting and compelling device in their games.
Yeah I definitely think the False Hydra is an amazing concept for an RPG, I just don't think it's really made for D&D. It's made for a World of Darkness game or Call of Cthulhu, or some other horror styled RPG system. Something where you have mechanics that can tie directly into the concept of the False Hydra. I think the real core of this issue is that not everything has to be shaped, molded, and fitted to D&D. D&D is great, I love it, but it's not the only RPG system in the world! I'm begging people to try other RPG systems!
I'm personally not so sure about that. On the one hand, as someone whose primary game (as a player anyway) has been Call of Cthulhu for the last few years, yes, I think a creature like this is a much more natural fit for a game like that, and I do think overall people should be more open to trying other games rather than just trying to fit everything into 5e. However, I don't think a concept such like this is that unfitting for DnD either. The main feature of the monster, making people forget both its existence as well as the existence of certain things whose sudden absence would make the creature's presence known, isn't something that can really be tied to -any- game mechanic, imo. That's because the crux of that issue lies with a (potential) disparity between player knowledge and PC knowledge, and that's not an aspect any game can really mechanise. Additionally, I don't think it's a good idea to cordon off specific themes to specific games. Sure, RPGs specifically built around horror wil be better at delivering on certain aspects of that horror, but that's no reason to exclude it from DnD altogether just because some other system can do it better. While DnD is primarily built around epic quest-fantasy, it's broad enough of a system to try out all sorts of different themes. If I'd have to learn a new system anytime my DM had a cool idea for an adventure, only it's best played in some game I'd know nothing about, I'd go insane. I know that's a bit of an extreme, just saying that there's plenty of reason folks can be better off sticking to DnD rather than learning new systems for specifc situations.
@@thegreenassassin553 Look I get what you're saying for sure, but I never said that the False Hydra was 'unfit' for D&D or that concepts like this should be excluded from D&D wholesale. You've written a very long and eloquent reply and I appreciate that, but there are words I feel you're putting in my mouth, and conclusions you are jumping to about what I wrote that I don't appreciate. It feels like you're inferring an extreme of opinion from what is overall a fairly short comment under a youtube video about haha funnee dum monster. I also never said you need to try a new different game system every time you or your GM has a new idea, that is an untenable extreme that no normal person would ever suggest so I don't know why you'd imply that was what I was recommending or suggesting people do. All I was saying with that part of my comment was that people who have played only D&D should broaden their horizons, because you don't know what you like if you don't try it. Don't take any of this as me not liking D&D either. I fuckin LOVE D&D, I'm 2 years deep in running a huge campaign atm the moment, I just appreciate the concepts other RPG systems can bring to the table (Hell, I basically want to include a "force token" system in every story-based game I run from now on, because I love that mechanic so much from the FFG Star Wars RPG). As for the rest of your comment, Yeah I do agree with your assessment on the unaccountability of the False Hydra's core in-world mechanics, that being the disparity between Player, DM, and PC knowledge. That is literally the core issue with the concept as a whole in an interactive medium and everybody agrees with that. Perhaps it's just a concept that'd be better suited to a non-interactive medium like film or TV?
As someone with no DM experience and almost no experience with TTRPGs, maybe a cool way to do it would be to have the player's minds be shielded before going into it's territory. Say the NPC that gives the quest or sends them there visited the town where it resides, saw it and had the mind split thing happen, then went back to their hometown where the players are. Let's say this NPC has some sort of magic or whatever that is capable of protecting someone's mind, or knows someone who can. They contact the players after while writing a letter or something their left hand took the pen and wrote something saying to find a group of strong adventurers and to send them to the town with a long lasting mind protection spell applied to them. When the players got there the hydra would know they had this protection, as since it can cast detect thoughts as much as it wants I assume it would do so to anyone in it's territory regularly, it would then be blocked by their mind protection so it would know. Because of this it would try it's best to either steer clear of them or lure them into a trap to kill them. Once the players saw the hydra and maybe injured it perhaps it could hide itself in some guarded area of the town making the players have to talk their way to it or fight the townspeople to get to it as the townspeople have no recollection of the hydra, I feel like it would make sense for the hydra to use the townsfolk's confusion and unawareness as a obstacle for the players. I have no idea if this is any good due to my lack of experience, just spitballing here.
The way I played false hydras is I would have a box show up once, then don’t mention them again, and keep doing that until my players either notice a specific npc is gone and start unraveling what happened or I reveal it to them and they finally notice all these npcs that just were never mentioned again.
1) Have a deaf NPC. Finding them should be the corner stone in the middle of the adventure that can unlock a lot of information for the players on how the monster works. They can remember people everybody else forgot. 2) Sneakily add stuff to the players inventory. Fill out the blanks in their backstory with people that got eaten by the false hydra. (Orphan character finds a letter from dad in their pocket ???) 3) Make it so each encounter with the false hydra is a short black-out that gives hints to players. (You suddenly are standing, blade in hand, a bite Mark on your forearm.) 4) as soon a the players plug their ears and see the monster, they can remember what they are seeing with their ears plugged. The song doesn’t make you Forget the hydra. Only people eaten by the hydra, and make the hydra imperceptible. But your players will remember the encounter they could see. 5) Have a goal at the beginning of the adventure, that acts both as a red herring, and a way for your players to get engaged before finding out the twist. (Because looking for a monster you are not aware exists is pretty impossible) My adventure hook was : Anita (deaf friend of the PCS) went missing. She Said she was gonna find her brother. But her parents claim she never had a brother. Why is there two beds and little boys clothing in her room though ? Where is she now ? 6) give them tools to fight the monster (a spell scroll of silence, for instance) 7) Have them find remnants of people that have dealt with the monster (A whole abandonned building that was supposedly always empty. But the food in the kitchen is still almost fresh. And you find journal of people feeling they are going insane because they are being gaslight by the monster and they don’t understand what’s going on. You can even have a journal of an unknown NPC talk about the players like they know them) 8) Make sure you have players okay with being gaslit and having their backstories tweaked by you. I did it with a trigger warning survey with many topics to bury the lead, asking them if they were comfortable with gaslighting, violence to animals, spiders, body horror, miss of control, etc… withoout telling them what will be in the adventure.
This got me thinking how cool a Elder version would be. It could extend each head up to 1240 ft?! But wait a second, 5ft move speed? This means that if a hydra fully extended it's head, it'd take 248 turns to retract to the main body. The entire time this snakelike neck would be stretched across the countryside pointing to the main body. The mindsong will cover the full area, but this means at some point there is a poor trader who can't figure out why their cart won't move, the whole while repeatedly drive it into an invisible neck.
I honestly think for an evolution, and to avoid having players recognize the set up for the false hydra, your idea that the heads just take the place of the person they consumed while charming everyone with their song to accept it as their friend/family/etc.(like you had mentioned it keeps impersonating the wife's husband it consumed)
I have the same False Hydra mini. One of my favorite paint jobs and display pieces. When I ran the false hydra, the players first encountered 1 guard at the town gate and 2 chairs. The players inquired about the empty chair, and the guard scratched his head before getting annoyed and saying the other guard has been on vacation. Next, they would notice that all of the town seems sleep deprived. They find an inn keeper scrubbing graffiti off the side of his building. "I SAW IT. YOU SAW IT" Over and over again. He tells the players that the vandal has been coming back every night, and offers them free rooms if they catch the punk doing it. When the Ranger stayed up that night to watch from the rooftops, he saw the inkeeper emerge with a bucket of paint and begin repainting the words himself , muttering them to himself in a trance. While at a pub, a drunkard left without paying for his drinks. The barkeep offered them a round to go and catch him. They pursue him, see him dive down an alley, and hear him scream. When they go down the alley, they find nothing. When they go back to the barkeeper and tell him they lost the guy, he doesn't remember what they're talking about. The Wizard finds a sketch of a gaunt face staring through a window in her notebook. The bard wakes up to find his nails broken, and the word "LEAVE" Scratched into his arm. And then the players killed the thing in one round because of lucky dice rolls. Disappointing end to some fun build ups. I also used a different stat block (Dungeon Dads, I believe). Still fun.
I personally had a great time using a false hydra as a recurring miniboss that would show up to screw with the party when they were doing some sidequesting. This way the players all figure out its showing up and start panicking because its strong but their characters have no fucking clue whats going on.
The "split brain" thing seems to be based off of a medical procedure called a corpus callostomy, formerly used to treat seizures in epilepsy, where the nerves connecting the two halves of a person’s brain are cut. This makes the two halves of the brain unable to communicate, which isolates seizures to only one half, but also makes the halves able to act independently. There’s a CGP Grey video called You Are Two that explains it in better detail if anybody’s interested.
I used a false Hydra when one of my party wanted to leave the game. He played the Rouge PC named "Blackbird". First, for weeks, I planted other clues. The tavern owner telling them "I am way overworked, I need staff to run a place this big". Then another time, they are talking with an NPC and in the background the guards are changing shifts. But to relieve two guards at the gate only one shows up. The guards seems to be confused in the background. The fair in the settlement has many unmanned stalls. Every time they ask me directions on how to go from one place in the settlement to another, all the other land marks stay consistent. But, there seems to be a white tower that seems to not be staying at one place. My players (above the table) laughs at me for not being able to keep the map consistent. Then on the day the player is supposed to leave. Nothing big happens, they go to sleep. They wake up, I directly address the other party members and say "There is an extra pack in your room". The bard asks me, "There is a bag other than mine, warlock's, and Blackbird's". I reply ""There is a bag other than yours and warlock". He askes "... and Blackbird's?". I ask "Who?". He says "The Rogue", I say "Who?". The Blackbird's player (who I did not tell about the False Hydra before hand) has muted himself. But we can see he is rolling with laughter. The Bard player finally gets it and plays along. Once the game is over, I asked the Blackbird's player to stay a bit and told him what happened. He loved the liea and was delighted to connect dots backward about the clues laid for several sessions. The white tower was actually a False Hydra head right in front of them jutting out of the ground at various places to sing and eat people. They "knew" about it only when they were looking at it. But when they looked away or blinked, their mind had already reconstruced the huge white hydra head and neck to be a "white tower" withe the only strangeness being it appearing at different places relative to other buildings. But yeah, I agree that the second part here had to be Gaslight-y. But that is just because it was on an actual player character. Sometime ago there was a reddit post on how it was done on a "fake" party member. That did not really need to gaslight. Part 1: www.reddit.com/r/CurseofStrahd/comments/v97klq/my_players_are_two_sessions_away_from_fighting_a/ Part 2: www.reddit.com/r/CurseofStrahd/comments/v9lusw/false_hydra_and_seventh_hidden_party_member/
Between the traits of "innately casting Detect Thoughts and Dominate Monster" and "eats creatures with intelligence above a certain threshold" it seems to have very similar flavoring to a mind flayer/general ilithid powers (basically a mix of a mind flayer and an intellect devourer). But also seems incredibly complicated with a lot of really OP abilities
This. False Hydra is just a mish mash of an Illithid and Gibbering Mouther and is a case of reinventing the wheel. Everything about most homebrew monsters that makes it not work is that they are just a reflavored monster that already exists so they need to make it OP as fuck to make it unique.
I think I have a two-fold idea for how to make running a false hydra fun without being unfair to your players. First, let them notice that they are forgetting things. They go to the empty house of an NPC and when they get there they know the NPC should be there, but... what was their name. And let the high INT or WIS characters notice that they're forgetting this person and give them a round to record what they can. Second, show that the characters are missing things rather than saying they forget something that the players actually did. Have them notice scars that they don't remember getting. Have them go to a building in the morning, and when they leave quickly, note that they're tired as the sun starts to set. Have them wake up missing most of their HP and abilities. Show them in game that the characters are missing time like how we see Dr. Who characters encounter the Silence rather than telling players they forget something. If anyone has more/better ideas or finds this helpful, please let me know.
A rough draft Homebrew idea after like 5-10 minutes of thinking. ->Make the memory erasing power simple. ->The False Hydra after successfully devouring a target can cast the Modify Memory spell, this spell can affect 1d6 living creatures who has knowledge of the devoured target. The False Hydra can choose the target(s) of the spell. ->Effectiveness of the Modify Memory spell is determined by familiarity, in a similar way to how the Teleport spell works. ->Someone who knows only rumors or minor information could have 10 minutes worth of memories within the last 24hrs be altered. ->A beloved partner or best friend could have the memories of their entire life be changed. ->The False Hydra can only cast Modify Memory in this manner once per day. Any feedback is appreciated, it helps me improve my DM skills.
@@morrigankasa570 If you have an automatic saving throw it kinda ruins the whole eureka moment of finding out it’s sound-based and making a strategy to counter it. Loses a lot of the appeal of the monster.
My Curse of Strahd campaign had a false hydra in one of the towns. It was really an interesting scenario where we had a player leave the game after our first session; we wrote him off and moved on. Now, 4-6 months later, we face the hydra and uncover a ton of secrets in the town. We eventually kill the hydra and find that that player who left, his character was with us the entire time and was devoured by the false hydra. We find his journal (which our DM mocked up) and all of his belongings that he collected whilst traveling with us. It was so much fun, and the hydra song our DM used was hauntingly brilliant and added so much to the atmosphere.
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bro this is your fourth time make this video. Youve gotta deal with that false hydra problem
How about instead the mindsong enslaves the listeners over a period of days.
they still don't remember hearing a song but players would experience something deep in the crypts of the village calling to them. It could turn out the whole village was enslaved by it a month ago and regularly starve themselves to makesure livestock goes to the false hydra instead. It solves the problem of the npcs not being able to "remember"/help and the players will figure everything out according to the pace of your story. out of game knowledge would only get them to the step where now they have to locate it's lair and they know the enslaved towns people who are putting on an act won't help them. Fairly typical dnd experience but you get to use your cool monster and on your terms.
much love jacob❤
@XPtolevel3 th-cam.com/video/Yt3GVbH_uuE/w-d-xo.htmlfeature=shared this is how it works the false Hydra works
tbh i think the worst part is that there is a real life false hydra; dementia.
this isn't even a bit or something i'm writing to be funny - you just fucking forget how you packed your shit up and got in your car, plus the three minutes you spent on the crapper beforehand. brushing your teeth, and the next thing you know you've parked your car in the concrete complex you've used for decades at your job. things aren't how you remember them, twisted and wrong. spots of memory are just entirely missing.
The problem with every best monster is that it requires the best DMing to make it a good experience
REAL
Doesnt everything?
What you mean you can't just.. "oh look it's a terrasque here go kill it" and make it a fun experience?
I would argue that a good monster should also be accessible to the GM
@@XPtoLevel3 Jacob I think that was a roast
I did it once. The party entered a town. It only attacked the villagers, not the party.
In the end after they killed it the party found a letter from another member of their party (a divination wizard) who saw their death and knew it was coming. This party member had never existed before this session. This showed that they had forgotten this member of the party had ever existed.
It was really cool.
I also had a young girl in the town who was deaf and mute. She did sketchings of everyone in the town, including those that had been eaten. She also had sketched the party when they entered the inn (including the divination wizard).
I feel like this is the way to do it without having to "gaslight" players. Have the them play through events that occur in their already modified memories, which contains some weirdness and contradictions (because the Hydra's song can't account for everything around the missing people) but which makes sense once they figure out what's happening.
Imma steal that one lol.
I did something very similar but with my divination seeking sorc. She's been away for a while because I took over as DM. Did quite a few adventures without her and some strange things would happen here and there. So it was a pretty big surprise/hit for them to realize their former party member that even the players remember is dead and no one can remember her. It was a great time, something I have been seeding over the course of years with my cartoon villain "The Eraser" who they would run into his followers every now and then on side quests that I ran when I wasn't the main DM. I doubt I'll ever top that.
That idea is genuinely chilling.
The problem with the false hydra is it's infamy, as a result it’s better to make a completely different monster or curse and use that instead. While pull ideas from it. Because no matter if players are new or old, someone is going to go “you mean a false hydra.” And then you have to play around that.
You say that, but this dumbass took way too long to figure out what monster we were facing when the DM ran a False Hydra adventure
It's the new "I attack the Gazebo"
Yeah, the monster can't be beaten until you metagame, and if you metagame it ruins the monster. It works great for stories but terrible for actual play.
Honestly, you can use that your advantage. A false hydra is more effective on a party who doesn’t know what a false hydra is, so if you do have something different, but that still gets up to anti-memetic shenanigans, the players thinking it’s a false hydra could lead them into a false sense of security letting you pull the rug. Personally, I have false hydras be canon in my world in that they’re a folk tail but don’t actually exist. Of course, if I ever want to run one, I easily could, and if my players metagame, they would know that false hydras are supposed to be a hoax, and they’d be thrown off the trail.
@@robertmoss196Nah it can work if you give enough informations for your players to figure it out. The false hydra is not perfect. Find the flaws in it’s system and scatter them through the adventure for the players to find and figure out.
I did it and it worked wonders. No need for metagaming.
Monsters are supposed to be beaten. Giving tools to beat it is not ruining the monster. Maybe that’s the problem if people envision running the false hydra as an optimised super cool monster that will likely kill the players.
The key to running it well seems to be not telling your players they forget stuff they actually played through, *but hinting at them having done things they didn't, or known characters they haven't actually met at the table.* The most chilling account of a false hydra game I have heard of was an instance where a party from a larger campaign stopped at an inn after an adventure, and a painter offered to paint the party in honor of their good deeds for the town. The painter told them it'd take a while to finish the paintings, and so they left for their next adventure with the intentions to pick up the paintings when they returned. Their next adventure centered on a false hydra, and after they killed it and wrapped things up, they went back to the painter to collect the paintings.
*There was an extra painting of a character they had never encountered before amongst the portraits, and everyone in the town asked them where their companion had went.*
They allegedly spent several sessions back-tracking through the places they had adventured in before, collecting fragments of information about their dead friend from NPCs that had 'met' them.
Generally, I think it's a very delicate sort of monster to use, because all of the impactful strategies for using it involve ret-conning the story somewhat and also subjecting players to some pretty disturbing themes which might hit a bit close to home. I think it's the sort of thing that is best played off by a DM who has known their players for years, and who had an extensive session zero, but who had that session zero so long ago that the players won't see it coming or be able to theorize accurately based on guesses about why such specific triggers were cleared in the session zero.
Is something wrong, or does this comment just end randomly?
@@reallyannoyingguy6625 Click "Read More"
@reallyannoyingguy6625 I don't see anything wrong, what's the last sentence of the comment look like for you? For me the last few words are "such specific triggers were cleared in the session zero".
@@reallyannoyingguy6625 youtube is probably bugged and not giving you the option to click read more, just reload the page.
That falls into the caveat that the only way to properly run the False Hydra is conceptually, and only with gaslighting the party. As a monster it's only popular because it was told as a pseudo-creepypasta. In actual games it's underwhelming and the DM's doing all the work they could've put towards an actually interesting version of the same concept.
While horrific, I would argue The False Hydra is actually a MYSTERY monster, so treat it as one, so that means for the love of all that is holy DESIGN CLUES! You gotta drop this thing in there with the intent that the party solves the mystery!
Perhaps a deaf beggar is acting weird, and vandalizing the streets with messages of "look up!"
Gee, the bard's music sounds strangely muted, I wonder why?
The "gaslighting" also has to be handled correctly. There's a way to preserve the illusion without ACTUALLY gaslighting the players. Perhaps they walk around a corner and... suddenly the streets are empty? Why are the PC's clothes bloodied and their weapons drawn?
I've run this monster successfully four times and each time they players loved it. Hell, I loved it when it was used on me and I was introduced to it then! It's all about how you do it!
joshscorcher jump scare!
(but also those are all excellent points, I pretty much completely agree on all counts)
Basically, it comes down to gaslighting the characters over gaslighting the players. The players figuring it out should not be the end goal, it's roleplaying the characters solving the mystery.
Not the only correct example, but when my group had it ran for us, we were just in a city we planned to shop and stay the night at on the way to our actual destination. So the party was split all getting the clues separately but not taken aside for individual scenes. We as a group had a bigger picture than the characters (though still only the DM knew the False Hydra lore at the time, so not a complete picture), and had to roleplay logical ways for us to put the puzzle together. Worked really well, since the campaign was already kind of "monster of the week" themed (in flavor, not in number of sessions per arc), traveling across the world (and eventually planes and one other material plane in the multiverse, but without Planescape setting travel) hunting down different related and unrelated (often eldritch) threats.
I really like the idea of turning a corner and then jump cut to the aftermath of a fight. I wonder how large the memory lapses could be. Could whole months suddenly be forgotten? You arrive in spring in the town plagued by the false hydra, and after staying there for maybe a night, you wake up and suddenly it's autumn? That sounds cool! I just love all the possibilities of this monster.
i feel like it loses a lot of its lustre if the players are aware of the false hydra in a meta way, so it getting popular ironically made it worse. It's hardly a mystery if you hear the DM do this and immediately know there's a false hydra in play
@@Shalakor yeah, the thing is, players can easily figure it out since by now the monster is pretty famous but that doesn't mean the characters figure it out so it can still offer interesting RP.
The original version of the false hydra was an article that didn't really even have stats, but was more of a well describe explanation for the creature's lore. It explained its evolution better, and how it effected peoples minds. It also gave a number of examples of how to present it to players in the narrative.
Designed for an OSR game by Arnold K., sept 4 2014, goblin punch. Original article: goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/false-hydra.html?m=1
The source material isn't much better, to be honest. False Hydra's just a writing exercise and concept, effectively an overblown creepypasta. It's awful to actually run, and it's such a completely binary monster in that if you don't metagame you can't do anything and if you do then it's trivial to defeat. Anything fundamentally predicated on needing to gaslight the players will never actually pan out in a game, the only redeeming piece is the concept of the consequences surrounding the False Hydra, the monster itself is such a nothing conclusion to that buildup.
@@KaleidosXXI Its popularity speaks for itself. It's a concept that can be given a variable amount of difficulty. It should be treated in stages, like the age of a dragon, and given more power as it matures. The d&d beyond version doesn't do it justice. If you struggle to make this monster work in a game, that sounds more like a you problem than the monster, lots of people are using it and are producing fun stories as a result.
@@KaleidosXXI The secret is to not focus on gaslighting the players. Let the players figure it out out at their own pace, and then let them gaslight their own characters until the characters can figure it out too. It's a roleplaying and potentially exploration encounter first, followed by a boss fight.
@@PhilggernautI frequently see DMS describing it as fun, basically never the players.
Huh... I don't remember editing this one.
Weird. Like I remember the intro but everything past the sponsor bit is just...
What was I saying?
Wow the real yellow cleric I am such a faaaaan xD
PAH! That amalgam creature is nothing more than the inane ramblings of madmen and liars!
Quick, put your headphones on and listen to your favourite loud music! If you see something unusual don't look it in the eyes and -what on earth is this in front of my window dear lord it's in my house please someone help I must get out and warn everyo-
Ah, yes. Bibberbang.
Don't worry, it's just the ADHD
A false hydra isn't a stat block. Its a plot device. You can't even FIGHT the thing except at the end of the adventure, at the point when it has been fully discovered and is now possible to defeat it. Every moment prior to that there is no need for a stat block.
I agree. I personally think the most important part of the False Hydra is the clues. The worse thing you can say is "You don't remember." because it undermines your player's effort.
"You feel like you should remember, but the thought escapes you somehow" or "none of you can agree on what the innkeeper from last night looked like, or if the inn even had a keeper in the first place. You think they must be running errands this time of day"
It's more making people come up with justifications on why things are odd. The wife not knowing why there are men's clothes in their house could go to explain that they're of a relative's who has gone to war on the other side of the world, or because they want to open a clothes shop sometime in the near future.
@@Velcraft I dislike the former because it's trying to retcon notes, which is really dumb. Give the obvious NPCs hydra plot armor or else you will go "Oh, you don't remember if there was a mayor." to the player who has a page of notes on him.
As for the latter, I think that's one of the good parts of the hydra. Have multiple people have contradictory justifications on something to make the players know there is something deeply wrong happening.
@@ferociousmaliciousghostthe solution is not to kill anyone the players have met and roleplayed with. Decide who dies before the players interact with anyone and then have those that died never show up. The impact of what they did can be shown in other ways, they can investigate town on their own and the DM tells them lots of information about it. Later it can be revealed that the mayor did show them round, only he is dead so no one remembers.
The trick is to play it from the point of view that your memories have already been altered, and what you are roleplaying is an adjusted memory.
@@intergalactic92 I think the same way as well. I think the only thing that I would do differently would be that the PCs just got there instead. So, they are a fresh slate reacting to them. The main bulk of the clues for knowing what it is and fight is through the "split personality" that was said in the stat block.
Now that I am thinking about it, if you want to forgo the horror aspect and lean heavily on the mystery, you can easily let the PCs control the split personality/subconscious to try to learn what the weakness is and how to warn themselves.
Originally when I heard the name "False Hydra" I thought it was a spellcaster's attempt to make a hydra out of body parts and it became this huge abomination with multiple humanoid heads as a result
That's what I thought too, I honestly wish it was that, instead of a really annoying bit
*writes down*
Oh boy my players are going to love this
That's called a Shrieking Terror.
your idea is way better lol
Hooray for something actually interesting
I ran a false hydra early on in my current D&D campaign. The party consisted entirely of casters at the time: a wizard, a druid, a bard, and an artificer (who started the game with a satchel of encouraging letters and trinkets from home). I started with a basic array of adventures (which are important to the telling of this story), made slightly easier to compensate for the lack of martial damage: A fight aboard a ship, during which the sailors aboard the ship were useless except for one that landed a critical hit with his bow; attacked by a vicious pack of wolves who were already scuffed up from an apparently previous fight; a battle through a crypt taken over by a cult, who were also similarly scuffed up from a previous fight; and breaking into a warehouse where some thieves had stolen a shipment of gold (a cityguard who joined them ruined their stealth approach by deciding to just kick in the door.)
Anyway, they ended up in a town where people where acting odd; the artificer was particularly bothered by it for some reason and went to bed angry that night at the inn. They investigated the next day and found a bunch of people who had forgotten things (the shopkeep had a wedding ring but insisted she was single; a stray dog the druid spoke to who insisted they had no master despite being well-groomed and having a collar; a growing orphanage full of kids who never knew their parents, etc.) That evening, they found the journal of a monk passing through who noticed the same problem and had looked into it, then had gotten frightened out of his mind and escaped the town.
The journal mentioned the monk hearing the faint notes of a twisted song, and at this point people the artificer succeeded in a wisdom saving throw and realized he had forgotten something as well. He noticed the satchel he was carrying had initials on it that were not his, went through the letters and trinkets and realized they belonged to someone else, and finally a name jumped to his mind, and the mention of the name made the others remember too: the artificer's brother, a fighter, had been with them the whole time. HE was the one who landed the critical hit aboard the ship fight; HE was the one who had inflicted extra damage on the wolves and the cultists; HE was the one who kicked down the warehouse door impatiently. The gaps in their memory had all been rationalized as something else. They had an argument the night before, which is why the artificer felt angry; his brother left to do his own investigating, leading to him being killed by the false hydra. And, as the party came to grips with what was happening, they too could now begin to hear the faint sounds of a discordant song drifting on the winds, as the monk had before...
The reveal was fantastic and floored everyone. One of my favorite moments from the campaign!
While I still feel as a player I wouldn't like this, that way of revealing things and them being able to remember once there is a trigger would be better.
All the memes I've seen about it just seem a bit, mean spirited? Clunky? Too much focussed on tricking the players than them feeling something.
With your steady clues they still get massive changes to their characters and motivations, especially the secret brother they forgot, but it's about their emotions, so it would be a lot more of a trigger to feel something.
The problem with the False Hydra is that it has an actual original creator who is NEVER CREDITED. Fr, can anyone in here actually tell me where the False Hydra originates from?!
They were eaten by the False Hydra
Goblin Punch
I was saw it from aj Pickett 5 years ago
I checked the vid it has credit
@@lorekeeper685The video has the person who posted it to the stat site, not who originally created it
I think the way you're supposed to move forward with it is in the Split Mind part. As they investigate the cursed town, they start finding notes that they don't remember writing. The implication is that rather than have them do something and then tell them they don't remember, you basically control their character during the part they aren't supposed to remember, then skip the scene at the table. One player goes to investigate a House but doesn't see anything so they come back and the other characters are confused why they were gone for 20 minutes if they didn't find anything, but the player only remembers being there for 2 minutes tops. Then they look down and see they're holding a note that says "RUN RUN RUN LEAVE TOWN RUN." Stuff like that.
That leaves the players completely bereft of agency. There is no meaningful choice to be made in such a situation. Like, it _reads_ cool and I'd watch a movie about it, but it makes for absolutely rancid roleplay.
I can hear the train coming into the station with this one 😐
@@ikaemosI ran it that way. You don't have to remove any player agency. You can give them false memories, what "actually happens" doesn't need to be played out.
I had my players roll a save when the hydra took a pause in singing to eat and for the ones that saved, instead of telling them that they saw the hydra, I told them that they had a panic attack or became excruciatingly stressed out about something recent that had happened to them, leaving them obviously distressed to the rest of the party as well as themselves. This was the false memories that their brain had made up to fill in the blanks for whatever actually happened, not necessarily the thing that did happen. And then it's up to the players to figure out that there is a monster, what it does, and how to defeat it based on these and other clues you give them. You don't really have to take control of a character to pull off a false hydra, you can just not play out a scene, male fake memories and flight the players.
Thankfully none of my player had heard about the false hydra and they loved it and were genuinely frightened at times.
@@victorjohansson6455 I'm fairly sure the "not playing a scene and making fake memories" IS the removed agency, because you have to decide what the players would have done in the moments of lucidity without them having a say in the matter. It's the same effect as just taking over and running a scene for them but without even the chance for them to cut you off and say they wouldn't do something in the middle. Sure some people will be fine with that, but they still definitely have no agency there
I interpreted the split mind as the players retaining control over half of their characters, with the other half unable to remember or describe what was seen. This way the players can still take whatever action they want, but they can't tell anyone about it. Frankly, it feels like a pretty boring way to handle memory gaps.
Honestly
To run a false hydra well you have to remember one thing, characters can forget, but players cant.
And a thing that links to that, players only know as much as their characters.
You cant just tell a player 'ok, you dont remember the monster you encountered'. What you can do is say. Alright, so everyone goes to sleep in the tavern. You all later wake up in this abandoned building, there are signs of combat around you. If you are to look out of one of the windows you notice you are inside that old house you passed on your way to the tavern.
You can have one of the smarter character roll some secret int check after they go to sleep to see if they keep clues for themselves once they wake up.
Or like. 'You open the door into this abandoned building you want to investigate and see...the insides of the towns tavern. You look around yourself and find that you are indeed standing infront of the tavern instead of the house you were standing before just moments ago.'
And so on and so forth.
Once you tell the players that they forgot something, you break the illusion. They have to discover that they did on their own.
So, what exactly is the game there? Everything that might constitute gameplay in this kind of scenario (exploring locations, examining clues, interviewing witnesses, putting together a deduction, confronting the big bad) would occur in blackouts, since every memory relating to the hydra or anyone it ate is deleted. You better hope your characters can instinctively solve the problem off-screen while you go from blackout to blackout like severe narcoleptics.
@@ikaemos Where did you get the idea that it all always occurs during any plot important scene? This is how you start roping the *party* into the fact that they are forgetting things. After this, it’s NPCs that have blackouts. And you trickle feed clues with that
@@ikaemos Not everyting
The point is they would only black out when encountering the Hydra, the blackout monster.
the entire investigation is still there, just the parts where they would encounter, see with their own eyes, the hydra, arent.
until the end, when they finally encounter it in the final battle.
That is better,
The False Hydra is so broken it pulled a Madara Uchiha move and put my entire party and I into an entire filler arc
The best way I’ve found to run a False Hydra is to leave clues to things the party has already forgotten rather than telling them they forgot something. For example, my favorite way to introduce the monster is to introduce the hook that someone in the party had dissapeared. Someone who never even had a player. One person in the party simply wakes up in a multi-bed room at an inn to find possessions that are not their own. It’s limiting in that you can’t have anyone the party encounter’s disappear to cause suspense, but that’s what makes the monster interesting. A lack of information is far scarier. Running it this way does undercut the song’s ability to cause complete forgetting of people, but it’s much better from a narrative and play perspective
Plus, you can use this lost party member for later plot hooks!
@theronjohnson2640 or even invite another friend to join as them later on!
This is the way I was thinking it would work.
I ran a False Hydra as a fully sentient villain in a mini-campaign I was running and I can confidently agree that it works better as a horror concept in an rpg than a statblock.
Designing a whole game around a sentient aberration trying to overtake a town and leaving clues for the party made it much more interesting than throwing a statblock at the players and seeing what happened. Letting them explore an environment tailor made for the mystery of the false hydra was also way more fun and considerably less headache than putting it in your weekly game. Also has the added benefit of you letting you write discrepancies in the story from the start of it for the players to look sideways at all the while. Very fun concept, very challenging statblock but still highly recommend if you think you can handle running one.
I remember the first time I discovered this monster and was like "Hey, that would be neat to put in my campaign". The chance to actualy integrate it into campaing plot appeared only after like 3 years. And for all those three years I often "helped" a party - sometimes they were finding useful things seemengly out of nowhere - clear and fresh health potions in a long-forgotten dungeon, or the exact amount of gold left in a pocket, or convinient way of escape. I wrote down every single time I did this and then, when time finally came, I prepared a diary, filled with notes about group's adventure from the perspective of our monk's brother. According to his backstory, monk lost his brother in war long ago, but due to extreme alcoholism gaslighted himself into believing that brother was alive and lost somewhere.
The diary revealed that his brother was with a group all along. He helped them as much as he could, giving potions, paying money etc. But party could not remember him. Not only characters - players themselves sould not remember him.
Any monster that manipulates minds needs one of two things: a reason the players are not affected, or Galaxy brain strategies
I disagree you can make it work even if players are affected
you can't manipulate the mind of your players, but you can manipulate their perception. that's the best you'll ever have.
@@niscent_this! Their memories are false, they are their minds trying to fill in the blanks of what was forgotten. Play with this by making things weird and don't give the players too much meta knowledge.
A neat trick is not describing or hand-waving stuff that the false hydra made disappear.
When describing stuff, you never tell all the details, that would be impossible or boring. You only describe the important stuff.
And sometimes players might miss an information or two.
But if you don’t give an information and focus them on something more important, it’s like a magic trick. They will themselves as player fill out the missing details in their head, and when they discover the twist, realize you actually never lied to them. Just omitted some information.
I don't think it can affect players, or if it did, you wouldn't know. You can't make the players forget things, you have to make them find things they should already know.
16:40 leomund’s tiny hut blocks sounds. My players used it and I agreed it was enough to stop the memory effects.
I came across the idea for a false hydra and had an idea for my group. They are all newer players so I've made things easier or fudged rolls early on to give them a chance to understand rules without getting to worked up over a player death, but I've recently told them I'll start playing it more straight since they are more comfortable with the rules.
Without telling them, I've kept notes since they started the campaign on what they have done, little conversations or interactions they have had, or times I fudged rolls for them. I wrote up a diary from the perspective of a 5th member, talking about what they have been through and putting in little notes about how they helped (the fudged rolls) or inside jokes they were a part of. I wanted to make it personal so they felt tied to the character when they read it, and also as a reminder of all their adventures so far. Then I set up a scenario where they would visit a town, wake up the next morning and find a backpack with all of these items related to adventures or personal stories and the diary. The players would find out info the same way their characters did, with no prior knowledge of this 5th member. I hoped they would have questions and fight the hydra, partly to see if what they found was real and partly to help the town. It wouldn't be a difficult fight, but more just an impactful narrative device, which I think it the best way to use the false hydra, with a few mechanical tweaks so it doesn't get frustrating.
Unfortunately, two sessions before they would have gone to the town my computer completely died, and I lost everything I had done in Foundry. I ended up scrapping the plot line, but I still think it would be cool to try out. It's a lot of work, and not every monster works well with every campaign or party, but if it sounds interesting it could be fun to try it at least once.
The false hydra can work well if you DM in a way where you pretend like the players already fought the FH and wake up with the aftermath. For example, the FH can split the minds of players, and the left side remembers and tries to communicate it to the rest of the body. You can have your party go into a town, sleep, and wake up with markings on their chests about the FH. That way, the players will feel like their characters slowly discovering the false hydra. Half the battle is knowing it exists. Again, it's very high concept and difficult to finesse in a campaign, but if done right it would be incredible.
The best way to make the concept work is to randomly drop things onto the party like they already had it. Items in pouches that they didn't have before, the other commenter pretending like there was an extra party member, notes they don't remember writing. Don't undo details, make up new ones that they don't "remember" the origins of. It makes the experience a bit easier to play out. Though the False Hydra could definitely use a more nuanced "how you counter it," like a person trying to intentionally remember something can roll a wisdom check or something.
You counter a false hydra with a silence spell. (Or wax earplugs)
If you can give a silence scroll to your players in a previous adventure it can be a nice setup.
@@narcozero8410 This is actually REALLY smart, you can even give them the scroll mid-false hydra events to help make it more obvious. Taking notes.
The real way to run a False Hydra is to instead run a group of bandits with a wizard using Modify Memory pretending to be a False Hydra. I ran this and the final battle was great because they got all ready, cotton in the ears and everything, but found a middle aged man hiding in a hallowed out tree casting Modify Memory and some bandits in a poorly made False Hydra costume.
I ran a mini-adventure with two players online that was a false hydra mystery. I agree, it works really well as a standalone. It actually went really well and the players had a lot of fun. I don't remember what version of the false hydra I used but I know I still have all the docs somewhere.
I randomized NPC deaths at night or if players were out of the town long enough. That lead to a really sad NPC disappearance and her husband played a big roll in helping the town remember and the false hydra down.
Also, if you run a false hydra, big recommend to randomize some possible effects on the NPCs if a player pushes them on the existence of a character they don't remember (like nose bleeds, or crying without noticing, or a full on panic attack).
I made it to where the false hydra did entirely erase the memory of a person, but only if someone was under its spell. So my players were invited by the mayor who they met previously, but when they got there the town's people all thought they didn't have a mayor. I also had players roll wisdom saving throws to see if they remembered characters they had previously met in the town that vanished.
The original Goblin Punch article goes into more detail about how to actually use it, a bit the 5e stat block doesn’t go into is how it can brainwash entire towns of people into its mind slaves to go and bring more people to it.
It's like, running a False Hydra is almost like a paradox:
The premise and concept really make it seem like a monster geared toward setting up a creepy and unsettling mystery - but the moment the player characters start forgetting stuff, a lot of players who don't know what's going on would start getting frustrated really quickly.
The obvious solution would be to not make the characters forget anything, and only have NPCs forgetting and disappearing, but that's pretty much the False Hydra's entire kit - unless you make some substantial changes, if the PCs actually encounter one of the heads, it doesn't have a whole lot going for it.
On the other hand, a roleplay-heavy group that's aware of what a False Hydra is would be more likely to play into the whole "forgetting" angle, but it completely destroys the mystery if any of them know that it's a monster that's causing the disappearances and memory gaps.
the trick is to not make the characters forget things that the players would need to act on, but to make them forget things that you as a dm can act on. forgetting the existence of a guy is a big ask to your players. but just never letting them notice the guy is missing, or systematically failing to find the guy because they forgot his face, is a much simpler thing that works pretty close to the same.
@@niscent_or just not telling them about NPCs you've decided they met and then later recognizing the names somewhere
Solution: don't run a false hydra.
The trick to make the parts when the false hydra erases player memories not frustrating is to make them actually hints as how the monster works.
« As Gorgash goes to investigate the other Room alone, you hear a scream in his voice. When you open the door, you see him standing, blade in hand, ready to fight, blood running on him arm from a fresh wound. Gorgash, juste give me your character sheet for a second ? » *erases a few hit points*
If you can sneakily add stuff to their character sheet during a break, it’s also a good way to have that « wtf » moment but in a satisfying way.
When the orphan character who’s been using magic shoes since the beginning of the adventure finds a letter in their pocket saying « I hope you like the shoes. Happy Birthday. Dad » now they have clues, feels, and a mind blown.
The way you do the "forgetting" part is by presenting your players with more stuff and clues, not less and less. You don't describe seeing a distorted face in the window and then forgetting it immediately, instead in the morning a player finds a note on their bedside table with scribblings and illustrations seemingly written in blood. Then the player realises their hand hurts, and discovers jab wounds on their palm similar to stabbing it with a quill or pen.
You as the DM have to have it all figured out, building a bigger picture the party could have experienced already but cannot remember. Then just feed a bit at a time from that bloated well of experiences your players have "never" heard or seen before.
A lot of what you can do with a False Hydra, can also be accomplished with a particularly nefarious Night Hag.
If I was to use on in a campaign, I’d probably have the two of them working together. Would make for a scary pet.
I imagine a False Hydra that uses its powers to just mess with people. Misplacing their Keys, stealing socks and so on.
"It was me Barry, I poured out all your healing potions while you slept"
I will mention a DM I still play with has successfully inserted the False Hydra into a running campaign, by the end half of us knew what was happening, but the other half not knowing kinda made RPing it better?
What made it work better in our game is we had a person with amnesia which played into them hearing the song somewhat normally as sort of a Mind Blank spell. The fun for the rest of the party came from the mystery itself really, you just need to make the combat more interesting than "go kill it without any trouble". In our game, the problem we had to overcome in combat is that we couldn't see the False Hydra due to the song, so when the person that could hear it saw the monster, he had to improvise on what we should do.
Now obviously there's a problem where the person that knows what's going on, or at least has figured out the song part of the mystery, can just be like "let's go buy ear-muffs or whatever", but if the players understand the idea, they would have to walk around with fingers in their ears the whole time or they would forget about things related to the hydra, including the song. If you stick a Silence on the group, they can see everything, but casting spells is a problem. You need to think of a believable way to avoid this problem which is the hardest part about it if you have players that just want to get to the end.
The other problem mentioned with the heads following someone in the party is not that hard to accomplish I dont think, you just set up the party members coming to the city with "NPCs" of other adventurers, but some or all of them die without the players knowing until they solve the song issue. If its a oneshot maybe ask each player to make 2 characters if they can, or link it back to their backstory. *The party are the survivors, not just the arrivals*
Either find players which will play into the monster idea and collude with them to make it believable or dont put yourself into a situation where they have to retroactively forget something, only actively. Like if you're following a criminal, maybe they just disappear as an illusion instead of being eaten in front of them and then having to play out the forgetting part.
This monster sounds more like it would be suited to call of cthullu than d&d
yuuuup. it's a really cool idea and it seems like it would be awesome when run well, but it does seem better suited to... not being done in D&D
It's criminal that it never landed to Japan.
My impression of it was that it only makes people forget about those that it eats. It's not going to just make your players forget about a party member that still exists and is standing right there. It is going to lure someone away from the group, wait until they are alone and then eat them, then sing its song and cause everyone to forget that person existed.
A way to run this would be to have your players come into a town where a False Hydra is and it seems to be a pretty peaceful town, but there's one guy, one dude who can resist the song because he's deaf or for some other reason and all the villagers are like "Oh that's just Crazy Steve, he keeps freaking out for some reason." And he just seems like a raving madman or something. Then the party starts to maybe do quests in the town, some small side-stuff and as they keep adventuring people start coming up missing. There are sections of missing time, like it might be two days later than they thought it was at some point. There's just big gaps in their memory, getting bigger as they stay in town. All of a sudden, Crazy Steve is starting to make sense.
Mindsong - My immediate thought - 'False Hydra-shop Quartet' complete with red and white striped hats and waist coats.
How much more XP do you need to get before you become level 4?
The problem is he keeps having to start a new campaign cuz of the cheatbait channels ruining it for everyone else
“Sonic damage” is one of my favorite things I’ve seen in dnd homebrew. Open your heart and you will see… or at least not forget the false hydra
It's always funny to see people make random homebrew damage types because you know they're just trying to get around common resistances lmao like dude just commit some characters/creatures should and will be stronger against an enemy than another you don't have to pretend "sonic" damage isn't just thunder damage lmao
Sonic damage is the original name of thunder damage
I think false hydra might been a 3rd edition creature?
Which at its cr its fair for those games
@@ShadowChief117 "Sonic" was a damage type in at least 3.5e, so it's likely the author of this one migrated to 5e and it's just a holdover in their mind. But yes, sonic damage would equate to thunder in 5e.
@@ShadowChief117to be fair, thunder isn’t exactly the most sensible damage type itself. Most of them make sense: bludgeoning, slashing and piercing are taken from the real world, and fire, cold, lightning, acid, psychic, and poison damage are general pop culture/fantasy things, radiant and necrotic represent like good and evil or light and darkness. Force is just kind of a catch-all to prevent immunities and resistances, and then there’s thunder, which feels super out of place because it really should just be under bludgeoning damage like fall damage is, but it feels like the original creator just wanted a more thematic damage type and not have people immune to bludgeoning also be immune to thunder.
@@ShadowChief117 Nah, the creator's probably just getting mixed up with 3.5 edition rules, where Sonic is one of the 5 types of energy damage. You can see that they make a couple references to "move actions" in the statblock, which is also an older edition thing that was phased out in 5e.
I do like the split mind idea, it seems to be based off of the bicameral mind. The idea that the brain is split into the left and right sides that effect different functions in your body, thought writing etc. Its even been observed in real life by people who have had the two hemispheres of their brain surgically seperated. Granted based on more recent science it isnt 100% sound as not every function of your brain can be split right down the middle. But its neat
Some people lose the ability to speak normally, but retain the ability to sing. Still think and feel the same things, but for a time you have to sing your thoughts instead of speaking them, though also the human brain has a lot of neuroplasticity and whatever remains intact will eventually reroute itself into a more normal set of functions.
There's also longstanding myths that because of this brain divide, you can't read text in your dreams. May be true for some people, just as apparently some people dream in black and white instead of full color. I most certainly can read text in my dreams, but lack object permanence - as soon as an item or place is out of my line of sight, it either stops existing or transforms into something else, and the glyphs in a passage of text may scramble or change to random squiggles or letters from languages I don't read or change to completely different, but still legible text.
My solution has been to add that creatures which have been exposed to certain obscure magic (which of course the party has encountered) have a partial immunity to the mindsong such that they can remember enough to be able to continue investigating, e.g. they can faintly hear the song in the distance of the town, or they get a save against the mindsong that lets them see the false hydra without forgetting it for 24 hours
I actually ran the false hydra for an interlude in my campaign around Halloween.
We had lost a player who quit for an unimportant reason, but I kept saying that NPC’s and such kept saying the five of you, and played it off like I had written a script well in advance and just kept mistakenly saying it.
Cut to a few weeks later, and they get letters from a friend from a town that align with the typical false hydra narrative.
We had a ton of fun, discovering that they had in fact been a party of five the whole time, I think the false hydra would be a poor villain for a whole campaign, but for two sessions near Halloween, it was very fitting.
Plus I got to try my hand at writing some horror stuff, which was fun. All in all, I do get why it’s so highly rated, because when it works, it works really well.
Yeah the False Hydra’s biggest weakness is how well known it is. The only way I was ever able to get away with one was by making a twist where the False Hydra was just another level of evolution of the Oblex.
If I were to ever do this, it would be to transition a party from “easy mode” with a bunch of health potions everywhere and reveal there was a healer in the party that got eaten by the hydra
Reading through, I think you do a real good mindfuck (this does require a party to be pretty good with dark themes ofc). Someone had suggested that a painter approaches the party and asks them if they want a portrait done of the party, the party agrees and they are told 'it will be very detailed come back in a few months and it'll be ready'. The players then go off and adventure.
Run them through a few adventures and quests. After every return to town they find some free swag at the inn they are staying at. Sometimes in the form of you find some extra gear next to yours in your room. Or 'as you are leaving the barkeep hands you some stuff, he thinks one of you dropped it last night' it contains some odds and ends, and a couple nice little magical items (nothing too crazy unless you're going for a really powerful game), but stuff they might enjoy and won't turn down after they check to make sure it isn't cursed. A +1 sword, a cloak of Elvenkind, boots of haste, etc.
The trick is while on the adventures try and give a couple spots that feel suspiciously easy alongside some unseen help. The evil goblin tribe leader is distracted by something they can't see. In the middle of a big fight with orcs several bow shots fly from nearby and get a couple nice hits. They are about to attack a bandit camp and suddenly a power keg explodes on the other side and gives them the distraction to move in for a surprise attack. Maybe for some reason the right hand man of a minor BEG goes down after 1 or 2 hits (receiving even less damage than a normal grunt they fought to get to the room) While travelling they randomly have advantage on a couple rolls as if they were getting help (maybe for finding the path through a thicket, maybe looking for a magical relic in a tomb). And whatever else you can think of, maybe going with your idea of randomly they find an extra health potion or three in their pack or after a gruelling fight they find some weirdly spaced health potions on a table that they hadn't seen as the fight started.
Later when they get the painting it is the party but with 3-4 other people (obviously the kicker being with the gear that they 'dropped' or found at the inn). Pair this with a book describing their adventures written by one of the 'previous' group members starts pretty normal (though obviously totally alien to them because it lists multiple other people being part of all their adventures, it was super cool how Treda managed to bullrush the BEGs right hand man and give him a good few smacks to soften him up for the PC barbarian to take him down with one mighty cleave!) and have it end abruptly. The writer decided to re-read the book and realized that they have written about several people they don't know, they know the party, they are RIGHT HERE, but these other people, who are they, why does their brain hurt, they have to warn their friends, they have to tell them that something weird is going on and that is the final entry.
That sudden meta knowledge drop of 'you guys have had 4 other party members fighting alongside you, you were friends with, helped you out are not only dead, but you can't even remember you travelled with them' should be a good punch to the belly button.
Sort of reminds me of John Dies at the End, the main character realizes that they had something similar happen, when the shadow people kill his friends they didn't just kill them, but wiped them from time and space. The main character can recall the most minor figments of them, how they helped along the adventure, but when they were wiped out of existence they simply faded from the worlds collective memory and now only exist as a name and a ghost of a face.
I love dungeoning my dragons
She dragon in my dungeon till I- ❌
she homebrew on my hydra till I false
I love finding paths
@@XPtoLevel3 nope, not it ❌
I still remember one of my better con jokes, where I saw someone dressed as The Silence, and asked the guy at the booth I was buying from what the character was. He explained it was a Dr Who villain, I said cool, kept looking at his stuff, then looked over my shoulder at the guy dressed as The Silence and asked the guy at the booth what that character was. I guess I had a pretty good poker face because he did a triple take before he laughed.
I ran a False Hydra once. It was being used by a massive prison the size of a city to spirit away individuals to be metaphysically crushed into Warforged cores. The entire point was that it kept the prisoners placid as they continued to do their forced labor all the while they kept losing the people that they may form any sort of bonds with. And the party loved it because I kinda said "Well, there's a bunch of circumstances that make this strange, so basically you only forget *what happens while you can see the False Hydra* which is how the stat block seems to read". As such, they were able to put together bits and pieces like "Oh, I remember talking to a person that isn't here anymore" or "Oh something is wrong with my friend who was just yelling about a monster and now it's not there". Basically, use the False Hydra as a hit-and-run style of monster, where it focuses one party member and *that party member alone* forgets it, not everyone else. This combined with the other plot stuff going on at the prison combined to make a really fun mystery of why the prison was doing what it was doing and how to stop a monster that seemed ingrained in the entire city-sized area. And to do this they decided to take the thing out at the root, as for all intents and purposes the False Hydra is just a really big, really dangerous plant. They had the wizard's familiar turn into a monkey, used a bunch of beads of water prepared using dust of dryness (which basically amounted to a large 6-foot deep pond of water), stuck a bomb on there, and let the familiar get eaten. It blew up, the water expanded, the False Hydra exploded from the water pressure, and everyone got their memories back.
My DM ran the false hydra in a way that was actually really cool imo. As we tried to figure out what was going on, we’d wake up and find an extra backpack at our camp or letters on our persons from a mysterious author. Upon killing the hydra, our DM revealed that our party had actually had a bard (for 20+ sessions) that we all didn’t know existed because the hydra ate them. I thought this was really well done since we as players genuinely had no memory of the bard, making it so we didn’t have to gaslight ourselves. Overall sick part of our campaign!
I used my own statblocks when I ran a False Hydra. (I only had the base concept at the time.)
I made separate statblocks for the body, heads, & claws. They also went on separate initiative counts and had their own Actions. I based a lot of the mechanics for the fight itself on the Dead Hand from Ocarina of Time, but with more heads & longer necks & a song tossed in with a saving throw. (Slashing, piercing, & psychic damage types, not "sonic", which was the 3.5e version of thunder). The heads can Bite, and can screech when hurt, and the body makes claws pop up out of the ground, which then attack on their turns. (Maximum claws = current head count.) The body's HP is high, but damaging heads & claws also damages the body, which is its "real" hp, but it means an area attack can damage it multiple times. Weakest head regens 20 on the body's turn, & a downed head won't grow back until 60.
My version of the song:
Mind Altering Song (Aura hearing range, at the starts of your turns): Charm - Wis save (15) or forget hydra is present. -1d4 to your roll per additional head if in multiple heads' auras. Advantage if you've figured it out. Immune if deafened.
When it came to player interactions... I simply didn't have anyone the real players interacted with get eaten, so I never had to gaslight them about their actual experiences. I did, however, have an extra bag of adventuring gear be in their room when they woke up, implying the existence of a party member they have no recollection of (& acting as a way to give the party some loot partway through their search). In the journal for this unknown person were tales of the party's adventure, through the POV of someone who'd never been there as far as they knew... (And reading a few choice scenes corrected a few impossible feats from early in the game when we didn't know the rules well enough yet & made some calls that wouldn't've actually worked with the game's rules.) I gave this party member a name based on something that the players misremembered the name of at some point a while back, so there would be a really faint hint of familiarity, but nothing attached to it.
There were also other weirdnesses in town (before the party showed up):
* The inn was named with two nicknames, but only one of these names applies to the owner
* There's a room in the inn that he never rents out & doesn't know why (full of baby furniture)
* The town voted to not have a mayor anymore over a decade ago
* There's a karen that finds it cathartic to show up to the empty mayoral office each day to shout her grievances
* The general store had always run on an honor system that no one had ever challenged
* There's a boy who was born without parents, who's going to inherit that store when he turns 16, and everyone just accepts this as normal. (He lives by himself, but his aunt checks in on him regularly.)
* The imprisoned beggar who's been shouting about some kind of monster and there being missing people (he's deaf & was imprisoned for causing disturbances, claiming that there used to be twice as many people in this town)
This was one of the PC's hometown, but he never checked in on his family. (They're fine & safe.) He remembered orc raiders being an issue though, something no one else seemed to remember. The party found the orc settlement nearby & it was completely empty.
We rotate DMs, so my character wasn't with the party for this adventure... It was thousands of miles away... So when I handed the campaign to the next DM, my character rejoined the party and asked them about the now missing party member that I had basically retconned in.
Ive always thought the idea of a false hydra haunting one person would be cool, kind of like gavins friend from RDR2; like he starts off as a one-off character looking for his brother, then the next time hes looking for his brother and his wife, and so on and so forth until someone notices a creature in the forest of a multi-headed monster revelling in this persons pain
In the video at 13:24 you were confused about whether the false hydra is pretending to be the husband. The false hydra deletes all the memories of the person it consumed (they don't eat it slowly over a long time, they grab the person and eat them immediately. Not stalk them or follow them). Nobody remembers that person ever existed at all because they have been consumed. The items of clothing belonged to the husband and the woman finding them is confused because there are clothes there from a man and no man has ever lived with them as far as they can remember.
Honestly, i still love the False Hydra because it really does feel like you can mold it any way that you want to fit and alter your homebrew world.
Case in point, my version of the false hydra was formed when a maddened artificer from millenia past took the flesh of the Far realms and tried to mold it to male puppets unseen by the gods.
But beyond that, i made two alterations to allow for more dynamic storytelling: Those that have natural psionic abilities are resistant to the Hydras song and can still remember it, and those who share flesh with it are also resistant, being Changelings. Three of my eight players have this trait unknowingly, and thus it adds an extra mystery of "why can WE see it when the others cannot?"
The false hydra is an incredible horror monster, but as a monster in an rpg it falls short because the intended mechanics have no weaknesses. In order for the false hydra to work as an rpg monster the concept of what the memory wipe abilities do would need to be changed and have more weaknesses. I like the idea of giving it an at will (or maybe even 3/Day) Suggestion or Charm Person or something (instead of dominate monster) and creatures charmed by it can see it and become immune to the memory wipe ability for a period of time in case they manage to break the charm before being consumed. Even this concept has some issues but I think this alleviates some of the problems with the disruptive nature of the memory wipe at the table with more recourse to counter the hydra attempting to kill a player.
The intended mechanic does have weaknesses but it relies on the players figuring out what’s going on.
Since the song is sound based spells such as silence, items like wax earplugs, actions like submerging yourself in water or really anything that stops noise straight up stops the effects of the song and can give the player a window as a counter.
Though mostly I see the false hydra as more so a narrative pice rather than a boss monster to throw at the players, like a lot of horror monsters in ttrpgs
15:29 I kinda do wanna comment on this particular part of the video. I personally feel like that is NOT a problem with the monster itself, but a problem with players metagaming. Like, the player themselves may know about the false hydra, but how does the character know? Seeing as the False Hydra is supposed to be a creature whose gimmick is causing people to forget that it exists and it's very existence is debated amongst scholars to actually exist, I feel like identifying the memory gaps as evidence of a False Hydra would be like a DC 30 Arcana check, with failures leading players into false answers (like "this looks like some sort of memory modification spell"), and that might not even tell you how the creature even does the memory alteration, more so that you have simply heard of such a creature. Therefore it is extremely unlikely that the party will learn to just "cover their ears" unless they are metagaming.
But then you run into the opposite issue, if the false hydra is so rare that none of the PCs know anything about it, how do they do anything about it? Certainly you could have them find notes (maybe even notes they personally wrote) giving them clues, but that's just you the DM handing them info. That's the real issue, you can find all the letters from people you don't know, extra gear, and unexpected spare bedrolls you want but until you know about the song you can't actually act on anything in a meaningful way. And once you know how to deal with the song any detective work you did prior is redundant because you now "remember"
Here are my feelings about the false hydra, as a DM who has run the false hydra for my players.
Its not a monster that you can run like you do a dragon or a goblin. It's more of a story piece, if you put a false hydra into your game, DO NOT let your players see or know about the hydra until you intend for them to fight it. If you do let them see it you'll end up having to do what Jacob did in ice-wind dale and just tell the players to pretend they don't know it's there. So what you should do is hint at a false hydra to your players by having inconsistencies in your narrative. This requires more time and planning so it's not for newer DMs or those who struggle with improv. Have the players enter a town, and drop some clues that there are missing people, say there is a great big Church in the middle of town, but no cleric ever gives sermons, or maybe the town has a keep, but its throne always stays empty. Once you feel that you've dropped enough clues its time for the false hydra to attack the players, once it does so it can't be singing and so can be seen.
hope this helps people.
TLDR
the false hydra is a story, not a monster, and using one requires a different DMing approach.
The False Hydra feels like it can be useful as something to throw on the side, just gotta give it a lot less focus. You get a quest to rescue a man from a dungeon from a woman in town, perhaps the woman, lets say their name is "Ivory" has some kind of helpful knowledge about the BBEG they want to keep under lock in key. You do that, and as you come back to the town to collect your reward, you cannot find her, you ask around and they're like "who is Ivory?"
There's another explanation here, a woman with that kind of knowledge is someone the BBEG might want disposed of. But in actuality, she was just devoured by a False Hydra.
You can do stuff like that with a False Hydra and not have it dominate the game, just having it exist to make fighting the BBEG inconvenient, the works of some outside entity minding its own business that just strangely coincides with making the parties job harder.
The empty throne is such a cool idea. I’ll remember it if i ever do a false hydra style monster ever again.
« Why is the throne empty ? »
« I dunno, the last king had no heir, and nobody wanted to take the job, i guess ? »
@@narcozero8410 Glad you liked my suggestion! Feel free to use it
@@ShadeKirby500 Yeah, I think Jacob was right when he said that the adventure would have to be built around the false hydra. That's what I meant when I called it a story piece as opposed to a monster.
False Hydra's are a good side story in your campaign. After returning from a long adventure to the main hub and some strange things have been happening since you left, and you tend to a session and a half on it. It's never going to be a main villain or something but a sub plot villain... sure.
I ran a false hydra in my party. It takes the right type of players. I luckily have players where if i tell them they dont notice something then they act as if their character doesnt see anything and role plays on withiut metagaming.
The way I played the hydra is that they came to a village with a much smaller population compared to the number of houses. They met a few NPCs, one of which was a bartender at the tavern. The next day, they went back to the tavern, and there was no bartender, and all of the people in the bar said they've never had a bartender. I told my players that they never met a bartender there, and they roleplayed like they hadn't. They met an NPC with the words "dont forget" carved on their arm when they woke up that morning with no recollection on where it came from. Eventually, they found a secret passage with some corpses with cotton stuffed in their ears as a clue that they need to block their hearing. I made them roll a wisdom save, which one player passed. I asked all of the other players to leave the room and described the false hydra to the lone player. They were able to convince the other players about the monster, and they fought the hydra having to pass a widsom save each turn or forgetting the false hydra was even there. It was one of our favorite sessions in the 3 years we have been playing together.
Its a mystery. You never tell the player something and later say they have now "forgotten it" you explain things from the perspective that they have already forgotten them.
Like they are walking around the town at night hearing weird sounds and suddenly its night time and they are on the other side of the town with hp missing, spell slots used, covered in blood and grime. They clearly have just been in a battle but they don't remember it. That's how you explain it to them. You can't break the illusion, you have to let the players figure out something is messing with their memories.
Or they wake up in the room they rented in the inn and there is an extra bed with adventurer's gear on it and a weapon and clothes etc and it just appeared and none of them remember it being there and they have to figure out how that's possible, it's because they had an extra party member all this time but it got eaten by the hydra and now they don't remember ever having had a nother party member. But you as DM tell it from that perspective so they experience it as if they IRL have "forgotten". It's great fun but you have to do it this way to not break the illusion.
Of course you dont tell them something they forget, that would't make any sense, thats the whole point.
i had a GM use this as the twist villain for a murder mystery in a snowed in manor. it was really slick. There was a whole cast of NPC's he introduced and physical notes he passed out every session, that he quickly reduced as we went along. the premise is we were trapped in this manor on a mountain pass during a blizzard and so the GM played blizzard sound effects from his computer - and everytime the False Hydra killed someone he'd stop the music - its something we organically realized was intentionally only 2 or 3 sessions in. Those notes he passed out changed every session to adapt to what NPCs we had left, and he grinned every second he gaslight us about some critical NPC who just up an vanished. it was very good, but in part i think because no one at the table knew what a false hydra was and so it just never clicked what was happening until the end.
I thought the idea of a False Hydra was that anybody it eats has all memory of them deleted from the people who hear its song, and its song also causes anyone who hears it to forget seeing the Hydra. So like, as soon as you stop looking at it, you immediately forget it was there.
So you'd find pictures of a loved one you have no memory of, their clothes and other possessions in your house, and have no idea how they got there or who this person is, etc.
I ran this once, and honestly its something i had to plan on very early, practically from session 0.
Party had no class with healing, one of them (artificer) only mentioned their mother in their backstory, and when asked said he never knew his father. Another (rogue) held a strong importance on family, and hooked the hydra in to those 3 things
The party had to go to the artificer's home village to find an artifact their mother was working on before she died. Ended up finding evidence of his father having lived there, and was actually the one who taught him everything, not his mother. When the party woke up, they found an extra bag in the room, and the notetaker found a message in their journal "Melora help her, its eating her!"
In the bag they found a journal detailing their adventure, and early passages wrote of her's and rogue's escape from the cult thar murdered their family. I the handed them a real locket with some art my friend made, of the rogue as a child with a younger girl. The warlock contacted their patron and they learned of the existence of a "creature that devours the memory of their victim" and they realized what I had done to them for the last year and a half irl
The players had never heard of a false hydra, and we're close friends, we trust each other not to be dicks, so they didn't mind the slight rewrites to their backstory. That being said, your mileage may vary, and not everyone will react the same way
15:35 a good thing to do is you have an entire town affected by a small false hydra that can’t affect high level adventures and then make them get a quest such as go kill this and then when they come back have the villagers say something along the lines of we haven’t had a mayor for many years
I have one in a game I've been running for a couple of months. The party's boat got damaged and the only port available was one that nobody was sure was running or not. People when asked about the port simply had no memory of anybody who was from there so assumed it was abandoned. The way I played it was if a person was eaten by the hydra you forgot they existed and you forgot of the hydra itself as long as it sang. Functionally this meant as it bit the players they would find themselves hurt and I would make up a story about how it happened, like tripping over a chair or onto a piece of broken fence. One of the players actually had the spell shield, and I burned the reaction as the wizard would have cast the spell to not get bit, and the players got spooked by the wizard randomly casting shield with no combat. I killed a few crew members and actually went into the player who takes note's bio and removed (temporarily) the mention of them and added new ones that got killed overnight while they were forced to try to sleep before repairs could finish, wakening up randomly to screams of victims they couldn't remember hearing.
So the left. :( They said, "this shit's too spooky" and left and put up warning signs, planning to come back when they're "like level 18 and can fart angels and kill gods". I do not blame them for this.
why am I able to recognize the grass at the start of the video as botw/totk…
Because someone said touch grass and you said "bet" for 200 hours? (yes it's from TotK, good eye)
@@TheADHDMalso i love your username
I would rule that the closer you are to the person who is forgotten, the sooner you forget them. So the players can notice something going on and give clues.
For example, the husband of the woman is eaten. She remembers nothing about him and is confused about the clothes in her house. The players who met them both yesterday remember she had a husband but can't remember what he looked like.
Causing the players to ask more questions and search more.
I actually ran it as a pseudo-side quest for the main quest of a campaign I ran a few years ago. The players figured it out because when they were deafened (such as when the air genasi used warding wind, or the artificer plugged her ears when planting an explosive) they remembered everything. Then, of course, when they took them out they forgot, but that's when I made the "split mind" thing happen. It was the split mind aspect, the notes and warnings that eventually lead them to finding and slaying the hydra. It was a lot of fun, though it did get way darker than I was anticipating with one of the players trying to permanently deafen themselves and other... things happening.
But overall it was a pretty successful horror encoutner to t-up a short Underdark adventure. Though it was difficult to run, definitely not for new DMs or impatient groups.
I ran a false hydra one-shot for some very veteran (like AD&D veterans) and everyone loved it.
It was also the hardest game I’ve ever run and felt like it was on the edge of completely falling apart meta-wise at any moment, especially because at least one of the players had heard of the false hydra before.
Basically, I got lucky. It was awesome, but very difficult to pull off.
False hydra would be great for a hub town that your party always visits but never stays at for long. The bonds the party should be making with the villagers not sticking and people never remembering them could lead to the adventure as something building up in the background of the main campaign.
I tried to run this monster for a one shot. My players walked in to the main gate of town and spent an hour looking at a wall in an alley. I tried to suggest to them that they should ask the townspeople about what was going on to get more clues. They went to a bar, and a servant of the mayor asked them for help with calming down the mayor because he was freaking out and behaving oddly. After arriving at the mayor's home, two of the players forgot about the man who brought them there to begin with.
I thought this was going to be a really cool reveal when they finally figured out it was a big monster making everyone forget people. We took a bathroom break, and when I came back there was only one person left on Zoom and he said I should DM a full campaign because this was too slow, then he logged off too. Almost quit DMing after that.
Sounds like those players just sucked. Like they didn't even try to engage with the story at all, and they just wanted a big thing to hit for the next few hours. Don't pay them any mind. Nothing you would have done could have stopped them from dropping out. The only way they'd be happy is you dropped them into mid combat and that's it.
Hope you're doing better with a better DND group.
It didnt help that they were drinking the whole time too. But I took the advice and started DMing a campaign and about 2 years later its still going weekly although I did take a long break. Every failure is a lesson.
@@lokhunt4329the players didn't suck, they were just mismatched with the DMs intentions...
@@thewavygravy6420 That'll definitely ruin a game regardless of intent. Happy to hear you're weekly.
@@xolotltolox7626 No, they just weren't good in general, chugging alcohol will ruin a game, especially if your entire party is doing it, it shows that they don't value your time, nor do they value the effort and skill that went into the game. It's as simple as that. Also, barring the drinks, dropping a game mid play during break without even talking with the DM is a shitty thing to do anyway. It's childish and rude, they wouldn't be a good fit with anyone at all. Stop trying to be devil's advocate when it's clearly not necessary. I hope you have a good day.
14:23
no, the idea is that they would forget they ever had a husband
I feel like this is one of those cases where people are a little too focused on the technical category over gameplay influence. The thinking is “It’s a monster, monsters have stat blocks, therefore it is a statblock”, when the fact that it is a monster does not exclude it from being an adventure module
When I ran it, this turned into my player's favourite and most memorable arc of the campaign. I did tell them ahead of time "OK, look, the next arc requires you to RP, dive into your characters completely and NOT metagame". And they rolled with it.
What I did with the whole "forgetting it" was, well, gaslightling, sure.
When they were investigating something I would tell them "OK, Player1 you realise you are standing in a slightly different place than you thought you were. You also notice you are holding your sword out...and you are covered in specs of blood...also, you took 12 damage and Player2, you are missing 1 of your level 1 spell slots". Or when they asked me "Hey, could we go speak with the innkeeper of that second inn again?" I would say "You saw a second inn in this town, but it was boarded up. And you have no recollection of ever seeing or speaking with the innkeeper of that place". And refuse to elaborate.
The part that really stuck with them and they remember to this day is: when they realised something was happening to their memories, they started taking notes in their in-game journals. And before the long rest they wrote down everyone's names and short descriptions. When they read it in the morning, I told them they see in the middle of the list a name and description of a dwarf barbarian there. They, as players, obviously knew they didn't lose anyone, so the WTF factor went through the roof at that point. And then NPCs throughout the campaign (that were outside the FH song at the moment of the dwarves death) would ask them "Hey, where is that cheerful dwarf you had with you?" and reminded them about that moment.
It's a cool monster to have just random information added into the conversation and pretend it was always there. So gaslighting for sure, but, at least at my table, it was fun for everyone involved.
What I think sucks about False Hydra is that it's a one-off monster. I don't think it can be as impactful of a story arc second time around. First time - it hits like a truck. Players have no ideas themselves and "WTF?!" keeps flying around the table. But if you were to run it a second time for the same people it would be more of a "Oh...right...erm...GeEeE I wOnDeR wHaT tHiS iS...". And even if they can RP ignorance, it's just not the same when the players know what is happening.
I ran a False Hydra arc in my sci-fi campaign where it infested a space station, but the way I did it is that the Hydra wasn't the only thing there; it was planted there by something else and that was the vector I used to feed clues to my players. One of them caught on to what it was pretty quick, but kept their silence because most of my players had never seen one before. In the end, I think they had fun with it, but as soon as the mystery was solved it was a lackluster fight and I probably won't do one again unless it's a low-level one-shot.
I played in a one shot where none of the players had heard of the false hydra before playing. DM did an amazing job of building tension and confusion.
Stuff like all the villagers insisting that while the town had multiple blacksmiths workshops they didn't have an actual blacksmith and never had.
My understanding of the False Hydra, is it's song hides it's perception to the people who hear it, and whomever is eaten by the hydra, is where the memory loss comes into play. The song would work like a form of hypnosis kind, and the person who gets eaten will be forgotten.
10:45 ErM aCtUaLly the left brain controls the right hand and the right brain controls the left
I feel the solution would be for the DM to simply not create actual encounters until the players figure it out. You can end one session in one spot, then start the next session with the party in a completely different location and not know how they got there. Sure the players can retrace their steps and find more clues, but when they get back to where they left off in that previous session, they ultimately find nothing. You could even do this as a one on one basis. A player could be off on their own doing their own research and then the next thing they know they wake up the next morning with no memory of what happened. The best way for players to role play not knowing what's going on is by having them not know what's going on.
I got to play against one once and it actually was really fun. The way it worked was the memory shenanigans happened when the party was out of town for the most part. obviously we entered town, iddn't notice the thing, but there were a couple times where we might have seena strange shape in a reflection, or od tracks on the ground, or some small subtlties, but we were in the middle of an entirely different mission and just thought the town was weird. THEN, we started noticing people disappearing. and we accidentally fell in a tunnel close to the road surface between our base town and hydra town. stuff started piling up that wasn't making sense, like the local lord remembering we did something for him to like us but forgot entirely we rescued his son, because his son "didn't exist" anymore. so by that point I meta figured it out but the rest of my party had never heard of this creature before so I kept it under wraps. but by the time we fought the thing it was the big beefy boi and damn, it was hard.
What made it hard was during the fight it would use its song and only one of us was passing each time, so we were basically taking turns on it each round, it was a lot of fun though and I got to really let loose with my artificer armorer, went full thundercrash titan on it.
Hello Mr. XP to Level 3, I’ve watched a lot of your back catalogue and I want to commend you on your weight loss. You look extremely healthy and even younger than you did in videos from years ago. I’ve also lost a lot of weight in the past few years and it has changed my life. Keep up the great work, on and off TH-cam!
aw that's very nice of you to say, thanks! and congrats to yourself as well :)
Idk, I know that in a lot of cases the False Hydra is really hard to use properly, but I do really love the aspect of it in that it is a kinda “mystery/horror” type monster. Most large and above monsters in DND (dragons, krakens, the Tarrasque) are big and boisterous, and slam or claw or burn you, and are well known, obvious, and feared in the areas they reside in
But the false hydra? Its subtle, manipulative… it is cautious and elusive, it is an unknown horror than many that are killed by it never even see or know exists. Its a silent murderous leveaithan, lurkning just below the feet of its future victims…
(Im also just a little biased because I dont know if its just me, but Ive seen people all around the internet constantly talk about how it’s impossible to run’ and ‘sucks as a concept’ and is just a ‘way to feel smarter than your players’.
Ok? Thats your opinion, but they act is if it is impossible to edit or make interesting. Idk, I just think its kinda lame to be an asshole and tell people they can’t run something or that they’d suck as a dm for trying to run something.
I’d honestly like to see someone make an attempt to make their own homebrew false hydra and see if they can keep the main horror, memory altering vibe while editing how it works and making work the way they want it to.)
The False Hydra concept sounds very similar to the spirit whale arc in Re:Zero. Also, split brain phenomona is a real thing and pretty cool if you look into it. I could easily see good DMs and story tellers use this as an interesting and compelling device in their games.
Yeah I definitely think the False Hydra is an amazing concept for an RPG, I just don't think it's really made for D&D. It's made for a World of Darkness game or Call of Cthulhu, or some other horror styled RPG system. Something where you have mechanics that can tie directly into the concept of the False Hydra.
I think the real core of this issue is that not everything has to be shaped, molded, and fitted to D&D. D&D is great, I love it, but it's not the only RPG system in the world! I'm begging people to try other RPG systems!
I'm personally not so sure about that. On the one hand, as someone whose primary game (as a player anyway) has been Call of Cthulhu for the last few years, yes, I think a creature like this is a much more natural fit for a game like that, and I do think overall people should be more open to trying other games rather than just trying to fit everything into 5e. However, I don't think a concept such like this is that unfitting for DnD either.
The main feature of the monster, making people forget both its existence as well as the existence of certain things whose sudden absence would make the creature's presence known, isn't something that can really be tied to -any- game mechanic, imo. That's because the crux of that issue lies with a (potential) disparity between player knowledge and PC knowledge, and that's not an aspect any game can really mechanise. Additionally, I don't think it's a good idea to cordon off specific themes to specific games. Sure, RPGs specifically built around horror wil be better at delivering on certain aspects of that horror, but that's no reason to exclude it from DnD altogether just because some other system can do it better. While DnD is primarily built around epic quest-fantasy, it's broad enough of a system to try out all sorts of different themes. If I'd have to learn a new system anytime my DM had a cool idea for an adventure, only it's best played in some game I'd know nothing about, I'd go insane.
I know that's a bit of an extreme, just saying that there's plenty of reason folks can be better off sticking to DnD rather than learning new systems for specifc situations.
@@thegreenassassin553 Look I get what you're saying for sure, but I never said that the False Hydra was 'unfit' for D&D or that concepts like this should be excluded from D&D wholesale.
You've written a very long and eloquent reply and I appreciate that, but there are words I feel you're putting in my mouth, and conclusions you are jumping to about what I wrote that I don't appreciate. It feels like you're inferring an extreme of opinion from what is overall a fairly short comment under a youtube video about haha funnee dum monster.
I also never said you need to try a new different game system every time you or your GM has a new idea, that is an untenable extreme that no normal person would ever suggest so I don't know why you'd imply that was what I was recommending or suggesting people do.
All I was saying with that part of my comment was that people who have played only D&D should broaden their horizons, because you don't know what you like if you don't try it.
Don't take any of this as me not liking D&D either. I fuckin LOVE D&D, I'm 2 years deep in running a huge campaign atm the moment, I just appreciate the concepts other RPG systems can bring to the table (Hell, I basically want to include a "force token" system in every story-based game I run from now on, because I love that mechanic so much from the FFG Star Wars RPG).
As for the rest of your comment, Yeah I do agree with your assessment on the unaccountability of the False Hydra's core in-world mechanics, that being the disparity between Player, DM, and PC knowledge. That is literally the core issue with the concept as a whole in an interactive medium and everybody agrees with that.
Perhaps it's just a concept that'd be better suited to a non-interactive medium like film or TV?
As someone with no DM experience and almost no experience with TTRPGs, maybe a cool way to do it would be to have the player's minds be shielded before going into it's territory. Say the NPC that gives the quest or sends them there visited the town where it resides, saw it and had the mind split thing happen, then went back to their hometown where the players are. Let's say this NPC has some sort of magic or whatever that is capable of protecting someone's mind, or knows someone who can. They contact the players after while writing a letter or something their left hand took the pen and wrote something saying to find a group of strong adventurers and to send them to the town with a long lasting mind protection spell applied to them. When the players got there the hydra would know they had this protection, as since it can cast detect thoughts as much as it wants I assume it would do so to anyone in it's territory regularly, it would then be blocked by their mind protection so it would know. Because of this it would try it's best to either steer clear of them or lure them into a trap to kill them. Once the players saw the hydra and maybe injured it perhaps it could hide itself in some guarded area of the town making the players have to talk their way to it or fight the townspeople to get to it as the townspeople have no recollection of the hydra, I feel like it would make sense for the hydra to use the townsfolk's confusion and unawareness as a obstacle for the players. I have no idea if this is any good due to my lack of experience, just spitballing here.
3:15 I think that also applies to most normal potatoes
Can you quarter a false Hydra for your garden🤔
The way I played false hydras is I would have a box show up once, then don’t mention them again, and keep doing that until my players either notice a specific npc is gone and start unraveling what happened or I reveal it to them and they finally notice all these npcs that just were never mentioned again.
12:07 Actually, as a DM, I really the concept of the this monster is a nightmare because I haven’t the faintest clue how to run it.
1) Have a deaf NPC. Finding them should be the corner stone in the middle of the adventure that can unlock a lot of information for the players on how the monster works.
They can remember people everybody else forgot.
2) Sneakily add stuff to the players inventory. Fill out the blanks in their backstory with people that got eaten by the false hydra. (Orphan character finds a letter from dad in their pocket ???)
3) Make it so each encounter with the false hydra is a short black-out that gives hints to players. (You suddenly are standing, blade in hand, a bite Mark on your forearm.)
4) as soon a the players plug their ears and see the monster, they can remember what they are seeing with their ears plugged. The song doesn’t make you Forget the hydra. Only people eaten by the hydra, and make the hydra imperceptible. But your players will remember the encounter they could see.
5) Have a goal at the beginning of the adventure, that acts both as a red herring, and a way for your players to get engaged before finding out the twist. (Because looking for a monster you are not aware exists is pretty impossible) My adventure hook was : Anita (deaf friend of the PCS) went missing. She Said she was gonna find her brother. But her parents claim she never had a brother. Why is there two beds and little boys clothing in her room though ? Where is she now ?
6) give them tools to fight the monster (a spell scroll of silence, for instance)
7) Have them find remnants of people that have dealt with the monster (A whole abandonned building that was supposedly always empty. But the food in the kitchen is still almost fresh. And you find journal of people feeling they are going insane because they are being gaslight by the monster and they don’t understand what’s going on. You can even have a journal of an unknown NPC talk about the players like they know them)
8) Make sure you have players okay with being gaslit and having their backstories tweaked by you. I did it with a trigger warning survey with many topics to bury the lead, asking them if they were comfortable with gaslighting, violence to animals, spiders, body horror, miss of control, etc… withoout telling them what will be in the adventure.
i just imagine a lawful good false hydra that just travels around singing hymns
This got me thinking how cool a Elder version would be. It could extend each head up to 1240 ft?!
But wait a second, 5ft move speed? This means that if a hydra fully extended it's head, it'd take 248 turns to retract to the main body. The entire time this snakelike neck would be stretched across the countryside pointing to the main body.
The mindsong will cover the full area, but this means at some point there is a poor trader who can't figure out why their cart won't move, the whole while repeatedly drive it into an invisible neck.
The way I read it is that the main body has a 5' move speed, but the heads can be anywhere within their reach in a single action.
The 5' speed is the body itself being able to move around slowly, if it needs to.
I honestly think for an evolution, and to avoid having players recognize the set up for the false hydra, your idea that the heads just take the place of the person they consumed while charming everyone with their song to accept it as their friend/family/etc.(like you had mentioned it keeps impersonating the wife's husband it consumed)
The problem with false hydra is that all my players know about it so I can never run it at my table.
I have the same False Hydra mini. One of my favorite paint jobs and display pieces.
When I ran the false hydra, the players first encountered 1 guard at the town gate and 2 chairs.
The players inquired about the empty chair, and the guard scratched his head before getting annoyed and saying the other guard has been on vacation.
Next, they would notice that all of the town seems sleep deprived.
They find an inn keeper scrubbing graffiti off the side of his building. "I SAW IT. YOU SAW IT" Over and over again.
He tells the players that the vandal has been coming back every night, and offers them free rooms if they catch the punk doing it.
When the Ranger stayed up that night to watch from the rooftops, he saw the inkeeper emerge with a bucket of paint and begin repainting the words himself , muttering them to himself in a trance.
While at a pub, a drunkard left without paying for his drinks. The barkeep offered them a round to go and catch him.
They pursue him, see him dive down an alley, and hear him scream. When they go down the alley, they find nothing.
When they go back to the barkeeper and tell him they lost the guy, he doesn't remember what they're talking about.
The Wizard finds a sketch of a gaunt face staring through a window in her notebook.
The bard wakes up to find his nails broken, and the word "LEAVE" Scratched into his arm.
And then the players killed the thing in one round because of lucky dice rolls.
Disappointing end to some fun build ups. I also used a different stat block (Dungeon Dads, I believe). Still fun.
13:04 sounds like the whale from Re:Zero
I personally had a great time using a false hydra as a recurring miniboss that would show up to screw with the party when they were doing some sidequesting. This way the players all figure out its showing up and start panicking because its strong but their characters have no fucking clue whats going on.
The "split brain" thing seems to be based off of a medical procedure called a corpus callostomy, formerly used to treat seizures in epilepsy, where the nerves connecting the two halves of a person’s brain are cut. This makes the two halves of the brain unable to communicate, which isolates seizures to only one half, but also makes the halves able to act independently. There’s a CGP Grey video called You Are Two that explains it in better detail if anybody’s interested.
Actually, it's still used today in extreme cases where nothing else is working.
I used a false Hydra when one of my party wanted to leave the game. He played the Rouge PC named "Blackbird". First, for weeks, I planted other clues. The tavern owner telling them "I am way overworked, I need staff to run a place this big". Then another time, they are talking with an NPC and in the background the guards are changing shifts. But to relieve two guards at the gate only one shows up. The guards seems to be confused in the background. The fair in the settlement has many unmanned stalls. Every time they ask me directions on how to go from one place in the settlement to another, all the other land marks stay consistent. But, there seems to be a white tower that seems to not be staying at one place. My players (above the table) laughs at me for not being able to keep the map consistent.
Then on the day the player is supposed to leave. Nothing big happens, they go to sleep. They wake up, I directly address the other party members and say "There is an extra pack in your room". The bard asks me, "There is a bag other than mine, warlock's, and Blackbird's". I reply ""There is a bag other than yours and warlock". He askes "... and Blackbird's?". I ask "Who?". He says "The Rogue", I say "Who?". The Blackbird's player (who I did not tell about the False Hydra before hand) has muted himself. But we can see he is rolling with laughter. The Bard player finally gets it and plays along. Once the game is over, I asked the Blackbird's player to stay a bit and told him what happened. He loved the liea and was delighted to connect dots backward about the clues laid for several sessions. The white tower was actually a False Hydra head right in front of them jutting out of the ground at various places to sing and eat people. They "knew" about it only when they were looking at it. But when they looked away or blinked, their mind had already reconstruced the huge white hydra head and neck to be a "white tower" withe the only strangeness being it appearing at different places relative to other buildings.
But yeah, I agree that the second part here had to be Gaslight-y. But that is just because it was on an actual player character. Sometime ago there was a reddit post on how it was done on a "fake" party member. That did not really need to gaslight.
Part 1: www.reddit.com/r/CurseofStrahd/comments/v97klq/my_players_are_two_sessions_away_from_fighting_a/
Part 2: www.reddit.com/r/CurseofStrahd/comments/v9lusw/false_hydra_and_seventh_hidden_party_member/
Between the traits of "innately casting Detect Thoughts and Dominate Monster" and "eats creatures with intelligence above a certain threshold" it seems to have very similar flavoring to a mind flayer/general ilithid powers (basically a mix of a mind flayer and an intellect devourer). But also seems incredibly complicated with a lot of really OP abilities
This. False Hydra is just a mish mash of an Illithid and Gibbering Mouther and is a case of reinventing the wheel. Everything about most homebrew monsters that makes it not work is that they are just a reflavored monster that already exists so they need to make it OP as fuck to make it unique.
@@Elkantar_Rostorgh231mfw dc25 saving throws to just straight up no save at all. What fun.
I think I have a two-fold idea for how to make running a false hydra fun without being unfair to your players.
First, let them notice that they are forgetting things. They go to the empty house of an NPC and when they get there they know the NPC should be there, but... what was their name. And let the high INT or WIS characters notice that they're forgetting this person and give them a round to record what they can.
Second, show that the characters are missing things rather than saying they forget something that the players actually did. Have them notice scars that they don't remember getting. Have them go to a building in the morning, and when they leave quickly, note that they're tired as the sun starts to set. Have them wake up missing most of their HP and abilities. Show them in game that the characters are missing time like how we see Dr. Who characters encounter the Silence rather than telling players they forget something.
If anyone has more/better ideas or finds this helpful, please let me know.
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A rough draft Homebrew idea after like 5-10 minutes of thinking.
->Make the memory erasing power simple.
->The False Hydra after successfully devouring a target can cast the Modify Memory spell, this spell can affect 1d6 living creatures who has knowledge of the devoured target. The False Hydra can choose the target(s) of the spell.
->Effectiveness of the Modify Memory spell is determined by familiarity, in a similar way to how the Teleport spell works.
->Someone who knows only rumors or minor information could have 10 minutes worth of memories within the last 24hrs be altered.
->A beloved partner or best friend could have the memories of their entire life be changed.
->The False Hydra can only cast Modify Memory in this manner once per day.
Any feedback is appreciated, it helps me improve my DM skills.
D&D Beyond homebrewing my monsters till I (reach) lvl 3. (I hope this adds more positivity to my favourite dnd channel: Xp to Level 3
Also, I drop 3 xp and an rgb dice set missing the d12 on defeat
did a 1 off for Halloween three years ago. 2 of the 3 players figured it out early but they ran with it and we all had a great time with it.
The Mindsong thing SHOULD HAVE A SAVING THROW! Otherwise it's just a DM wanting to screw over their players!
@@morrigankasa570 If you have an automatic saving throw it kinda ruins the whole eureka moment of finding out it’s sound-based and making a strategy to counter it. Loses a lot of the appeal of the monster.
Just wait until my Blue Mage hears that song, the monsters literally won't know what killed them.
My Curse of Strahd campaign had a false hydra in one of the towns. It was really an interesting scenario where we had a player leave the game after our first session; we wrote him off and moved on. Now, 4-6 months later, we face the hydra and uncover a ton of secrets in the town. We eventually kill the hydra and find that that player who left, his character was with us the entire time and was devoured by the false hydra. We find his journal (which our DM mocked up) and all of his belongings that he collected whilst traveling with us. It was so much fun, and the hydra song our DM used was hauntingly brilliant and added so much to the atmosphere.