Gibbering Mouther

Gibbering mouthers are just wrong.  They are madness personified—or rather, blob-ified, with a host of nasty abilities to make them a handful to confront.  If you’re simply looking for a good subterranean aberration, mouthers certainly qualify.  But you can also use them to point to larger mysteries: What happens to a mouther’s victims—are they digested…or incorporated?  What is their relationship, if any, to the vile shoggoths?  Do they come from deep in the earth, or from somewhere…else? If your campaign contains places where reality breaks down and madness creeps in, chances are good a gibbering mouther is there.

Under the influence of a libram covered in strange glyphs, summoner Bramson Muel tries to call a shoggoth from somewhere beyond.  He fails—his power is nowhere near strong enough to pierce the veil of reality—but the very effort turns him into a gibbering mouther, just as a posse of tardy do-gooders arrives to stop him.

Derros are, almost by definition, stark raving mad.  A band of them has discovered a gibbering mouther below their laboratory, and they worship it as a demigod, purposefully exposing themselves to its gibbering cacophony while procuring it sacrifices for food.  (The mouther, for its part, is slowly growing…and slowly undermining the lab’s supports with its ground manipulation ability.)

After a series of exhausting divinations, the pontiff of Wyuth calls the most trusted lieutenants in his cohort for a special mission.  In order to save the soul of a paladin, the group must do what no man ever has: rescue a person already absorbed into the mouther’s babbling consciousness.  The pontiff assures them that one of the mouths in the aberration’s undulating form is the man they seek.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 153

Oh my God, it’s a monster entry that doesn’t start with “Giant.”  I don’t know if I can deal.  Thanks again for sticking with me for the past six weeks, and hope you continue to enjoy!

If you can get a hold of Dragon Magazine 160, the (late, and tragically so) Nigel D. Findley offers up a short but very sweet  “The Ecology of the Gibbering Mouther,” featuring an entertaining rogue (something Dragon ecologies seemed to specialize in) who delivers some nice comeuppance.  Worth looking for.  (The whole issue is fantastic, in fact.)

For those keeping score, I did escape work, made the party, and got to see some friendly faces I only get to see once a year, like (name-drop alert) Archie and Woody, among others.

Finally, tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day!  Get on that!