D&D: Five Eldritch Horrors Lurking in the Monster Manual
Do you like your horrors of the eldritch variety? Good news, the Monster Manual is full of eldritch abominations, and they’re hungry!
Nothing says you’re in a fantasy world like running into something eldritch. This is just another way of saying a little spooky but also magical in a vaguely gross way. Because while an ogre might be mean and scary, like an onion, you wouldn’t call an ogre eldritch exactly.
What qualifies as a truly eldritch monster? Well, you’re in luck. These five monsters certainly do!
Aboleths
Not only are Aboleths some of the first monsters in the manual, they’re also some of the first monsters in 5th Edition’s nebulous collection of notes that they call “canon.” Aboleths are old and remember a time before the gods.
Which is just absolutely wild. They’re also all ancient psychic fish, who have the ability to transform you into a being that cannot live away from the sea, living only to serve the Aboleth. Each one has a perfect memory, and each one concocts schemes that would take more than a lifetime to see play out. These are perfect eldritch horrors when you need something ancient and alien.
Not like that, though.
Grell
Best described as “what if a jellyfish was also a brain and had a raptor’s beak?”, a Grell is a predator with barbed tentacles that it uses to paralyze hapless victims before dragging them off into isolation to be devoured, still alive, but held captive and completely still.
Slaad
The thing about these chaos-imbued frog monsters you have to realize is, they can only evolve by parasitism. They can gain tremendous magical power, but only by implanting their eggs in a living host, or by infecting them with a disease known as chaos phage that will devour them from the inside out, leaving only a Slaadi in its place.
Lich
It doesn’t get much more eldritch than the iconic undead spellcaster who has used magic to unnaturally extend their existence if not their “life” per se. These bone wizards command terrible power unlocked only after committing the most evil and secret of secret evil acts and rituals. They can only survive by stealing and devouring the souls of others, otherwise, their bodies wither and they become demiliches.
Elder Brain
An Elder Brain is a massive, almost godlike intellect that both seem to rule over and come into being from the collective thought energies of Mind Flayers. An Elder Brain maintains a continuous psychic uplink between all members of a colony, so not only does fighting them run the risk of provoking everyone in their thrall into a fight, but it also means that the ones you do kill might just come back some time. After all, an Elder Brain can save a sort of “backup” of everyone in its powerful mental dimensions.
What are some of your favorite eldritch abominations?
