Brain Ooze

It’s a brain.  With tentacles.  Whose party trick is dominating you into doing evil acts, then wiping your memory after.  Fun!

While many oozes are a gross but explicable part of the natural ecosystem—essentially slime molds with attitude—brain oozes are clearly the result of something else: a curse gone wrong, experiments by aberrations, creatures from another world…who knows?  Interestingly, “they prize fey, outsiders, and spellcasters as delicacies,” according to the Bestiary 3.  A hunger for spellcasters is a given when it comes to mind-hungry monsters, but a taste for fey and outsiders is intriguing, as these beings usually stand outside the usual food chains.  That brain oozes prize these mystical/metaphysical intelligences supports the theory of some otherworldly (or even otherdimensionally) aberrant or scientific origin for these strange sensation-predators…

A brain ooze takes up residence under the stairs of an inn, having crawled up from the Lands Below via the sump in the ale cellar.  It is thoroughly enjoying gorging itself on so many new vulnerable minds.  Despite its intelligence, though, it does not fully comprehend human society, so while it has been careful never to dominate the same victim twice, it does not realize that a succession of bloody crimes that all point back to the same inn will raise authorities’ suspicions.

A brain ooze preys on sprites in Curvale Forest.  The little fey are up in arms, and they blame the folk of nearby Curvale Parish, whose wizard used to steal sprites to power his faerie lamps.  The wizard is now dead and the parishioners are blameless, but to convince the fey they need adventurers to search his tower and the forest for the real culprit.

A product of a malfunctioning life support system (that was apparently more can opener than hibernation chamber), brain oozes are all that remain of the crew complement of a crashed alien vessel.  Of the flight of five that inhabit the hulk, only one is still committed to returning to its original body and repairing the ship.  The others have become utterly distracted by their new powers, as well as more than a little cruel.  Their only ambition is compelling intelligence-damaged thralls to fight to the death in the ship’s mess.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 43

Back from my 25 hours in Boston!  (Yesterday’s post was written sitting on the floor of Logan.) 

Back when it was a thing, I used to listen to the podcast Webcomics Weekly, and more than once they talked about the magic of 1,000 readers—that when you got to 1,000 readers on the Web things just seemed to snowball.  That may explain why it took me well over two years to reach 1,000 Tumblr followers…and yet you all have boosted that number by 20% in the last 7 weeks alone.  Thanks for joining (and liking and reblogging), guys!