Found with a corpse in the lower levels of the Irate Volcano Island.

My assumption is that these floating masses of horror are related to Beholders. After all, they are floating blobs of flesh covered in eyestalks. But how or if the two species diverged is not something I'm able to determined and in fact despite the obvious similarities I have seen no other documents commenting on them. To be fair, I haven't found much documentation on the Deepspawn at all; mostly snippets in tomes stolen from the Mind flayers, and the Illithid language is notoriously hard to translate.

I suppose I should focus on the differences. Deepspawn are almost three times as large as Beholders and they have a mass of octopus-style tentacles and snake-mouth tentacles in addition to the eye stalks. They also have no central eye and or mouth. Their eyes don't have special powers the way Beholders do, and in fact the Deepspawn do not have the deadly powers like Death, Disintegration, or Petrification that are shot from the eyes of the Beholder. Between that and the lack of the central eye's anti-magic ray, they are decidedly easier to kill despite their larger size. They are, however, highly resistant to magic - spells have less than a 1/3rd chance of affecting them.

Since they don't have spells, their primary means of attack is actually through their opponents. The octopus tentacles have a hypnotic effect, lulling their victims into a state of passiveness. What happens next is pretty amazing: they take their opponents weapons while wrapping up their subdued opponents in their arms. They then use the weapons to attack any other opponents. Since Deepspawn live in remote, hard to get places, the weapons of their opponents are usually of the highly powerful and dangerous type, and having those weapons turns against your own party is a terrible thing. Meanwhile, they squeeze their captured opponents to death. The hypnotic effect only lasts a few seconds, but it requires a feat of great strength to break free. Each tentacle can grab two man-sized opponents, and they'll squeeze them to death in a couple of minutes.

The snake tentacles are of course poisonous, and the Deepspawn are also immune to all forms of poison.

While the eyestalks don't have specific magical powers, the Deepspawn do have access to a few magical abilities, including ESP and the ability to nearly fully Heal themselves once per day.

Deepspawn have genius level intelligence and should be highly respected.

All of the above simply makes them dangerous. For the purposes of my *ahem* masters, what follows is the important bit.

Deepspawn consume anything organic (although they prefer fresh meat), and somewhere between once and three times per day, they can spawn a clone of any creature that they've ever devoured, provided that they've consumed enough mass. The clones are exact replicas of the original creatures and can't be detected as anything other than the original creature in any way, except for the fact that they remain completely loyal to the Deepspawn. They follow orders from their "parent" (by the aforementioned ESP when necessary) and can never be compelled to attack their progenitors even by the most powerful magical means.

This ability is rarely useful in immediate combat, but a single Deepspawn can make an abandoned ruin, cave network, etc., a fully inhabited deathtrap in a few short weeks.

Obviously this is of great interest to my masters, and so I've been isolated here in my volcano trying to figure out how to best take advantage of it. Through some bargaining and threats and some heavy dropping of my masters' names, I've managed to acquire three of the beasties from the Mind Flayers, who normally exterminate the creatures on sight (or rather, have given orders to do so to their Drow slaves) thanks to the Deepspawn's spawning ability, which can clutter up the Underdark right quick. They were of course mighty suspicious of my desire to keep some of them alive, and it was an expensive and risky proposition getting these three.

I still wish I had been able to capture more. Because obviously we're going to want a lot more than three. I am unsure how they reproduce, so on the chance that they aren't asexual (who can tell?) my hope was to capture at least one of each gender. But of course I have no idea if I've done so. And to make matters worse, holding genius-level creatures prisoner is no easy task, and we had to kill one when it escaped (and nearly killed me). So I am down to two, and so far they've moved to occupy opposite ends of the volcano and have made no attempts to communicate (at least in person, remembering their ESP), let alone get it on. And other than emitting waves of pure hatred, they won't communicate with me. So the idea of getting one to eat the other and start spawning clones of it is also right out.

I'm now looking into magical means of copying the two captives, but I left Alkeziem's Tome of Surreptitious Duplication on the mainland, and the masters won't let me leave the island because I have to watch over the Baatezu guarding the Furnace or I guess they'll wander in and burn themselves up or something. Honestly, the Furnace has turned out to be a huge distraction and waste of resources. When I first stumbled upon it I was pretty glad that the masters were pleased with me, but they've nearly forgotten the bigger picture because of it and I've kind of been at a loss for direction since then (I don't normally leave my important books behind). So I've had to send Barbados to get Alkeziem's book and of course that leaves me pretty nervous since he was pretty important in dealing with the Deepspawn that escaped. Big axe beats spells when you're dealing with a creature mostly resistant to magic, after all.

We've been keeping the creatures underfed so that they can't spawn any more, but that just is making them hungrier and more desperate. I've considered bringing down a dragon to guard me, but the Orb of Dragon Control is being stretched to the limit as it is. I can barely get them to keep tolerating each other and I suspect being in close contact with a human will bring my control of them to the breaking point. So I just have to sit tight and hope Barbados gets back soon.

Posted by min at 2:50 PM on July 26, 2014 in General | Permalink