The D&D Monster That Made Me Rethink Body Horror

in 1247 ad London's first mental hospital was constructed originally called the prior of the New Order of Our Lady of Bethlehem it eventually became known as Bethlehem Royal Hospital often simply just referred to as bethleem or more precisely among your average citizen living in London at the time bedum the entire history of this institution is a long and fascinating if not somewhat morbid story but needless to say it's not a place you wanted to end up it was essentially a prison where mentally ill patients would be packed together in crowded rooms chained to walls and subjected to archaic treatments that can only be described as torture the notoriety of bedum was so widespread that by the late 1600s the name itself became synonymous with chaos disorder and confusion which is why even to this day when something is described as utter bedum it conjures images of total Anarchy so when Dungeons and Dragons rolls in with a new monster called the black beast of bedum the insatiable Allure of alliteration aside you know to expect something chaotic welcome to monster of the week the only show on the internet filmed live on location from the far realm today we are talking about a monster that doesn't just create chaos but is in essence the idea of chaos itself the black beast of bedum as always we're going to talk about what this bizarre creature is it's lur and ology and of course some ways you might use it in your DND campaign I've also converted it from Third Edition into 5e with some shiny new artwork so you can deploy this horror no matter what version of D and you enjoy unless you're playing first second or fourth edition I guess in that case you're on your own but whether you're playing 5V or even another ttrpg altogether this week's sponsor Game Theory tables has got you covered segue say goodbye to traditional setups and get ready to embrace the future we were promised and all those pulp sci-fi kn novels of the past we might not have flying cars but we sure as heck 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about where this monster even came from in March of 2007 Dragon magazine issue 353 had just hit the shelves and provided us with the first mention of this week's monster in an article beginning on page 64 entitled Outsiders of the Forgotten Realms we were given stats and a bit of ecology information for a handful of monsters for Third Edition these monsters were all Outsiders which is a classification that does not exist in 5e DND but was used to categorize creatures from outside the material plane such as Angels and Demons now funnily enough there are no actual stats for the Beast of bedum in this issue of dragon magazine but it is mentioned on page 66 there's a brief section that talks about how some of these Outsiders might appear in settings other than the Forgotten Realms and curiously the article explains how something called a black beast of bedum lives in the Windswept depths of pandemonium and an eon they might stalk the churning chaos of kith I'm sure this confused some readers while I don't have the whole story here I'm assuming it was a case of either the monster stap loock itself or the artwork not being ready in time to meet the Magazine's deadline but they forgot to take this bit of text mentioning it out of the sidebar entry for the and noology part of the article but in any case the Beast would appear 2 months later with art and game statistics as part of dragon 355 in May of 2007 longtime viewers of the channel might recognize this as the same micro bestiary that the oblivia memory Moss's Third Edition stat block came from and while there are a few other beasties in here we're definitely going to talk about eventually the black beast of bedum specifically appears on page 33 the artwork here is uncanny in the the best way it perfectly suggests that this thing was mere moments ago something that resembled a human I mean sure it's a tentacle beast but look at the two tendrils on the right they look an awful lot like legs and towards the front we have a tendril awfully similar to a malformed humanoid arm and none of this is accidental of course because this bad boy is a shape shifter sort of the Beast of bedum is able to cast disguise self at will which isn't an amazing illusion spell or anything but it will let you pass as a human from a distance as long as nobody tries to touch you or gets too close chances are you'll probably be fine so now imagine that you see a totally normal looking guy on a street corner suddenly erupt into this thing that seems bad but what exactly is this thing what is the Beast of bedom after all appearances can be deceiving maybe they're actually super chill and they just want to hang out and be kind to others while they fulfill their niche in the ecosystem no in their natural state a beast of bedum is constantly changing its appearance they ridee Slither and boil in an amorphous chorus of shapes that might vaguely suggest resemblance to other Mortal creatures which they've encountered they also typically carry around a humanoid skull usually from a recent victim and use it to channel whatever horrible things they have to say in a fimile of conversation with a living being I am a Skin of Evil M so I guess they're not beating the eldrich horror allegations after all it's not known specifically which plane of existence the Beast of bedum hails from but it's definitely not the material plane most Scholars assume they hail from the far realm given their whole thing but they can also be found roaming the many layers of the Abyss basically they're just drawn to chaotic environments as they themselves are an expression of chaos but that doesn't mean they don't venture to other planes and cause trouble from time to time their nature is so tumultuous that merely making contact physically with one of these creatures in any way is enough to irreparably change and mutate another living creatur's body if this is sounding remotely familiar to you and you're not sure why or maybe you know exactly why you know what I'm about to say this is a very similar M Mo to the chaos Beast a creature I covered on the channel a couple years ago and then another time like 8 years before that and that's because the Beast of bedum is meant to be a sort of B Monster version of the chaos Beast where the chaos Beast clocks in at a CR of six the Beast of bedum is a whopping CR 133 essentially the Beast of bedum takes everything chaotic and terrible about the chaos beast and cranks it up to 11 and the results are nothing if not effective the black beast east of bedum has a speed of 60 ft which is pretty fast for an amorphous goo monster it's immune and resistant to a bunch of different damage types and as a creature whose form is constantly changing much like the YouTube algorithm it's impossible to know what its next move will be it has two claw attacks it can make every turn and these attacks not only do a bit of damage but also threaten to turn the target into a spongy mass of Flesh excuse me why due to its corporeal instability trait a trait that it shares with the chaos Beast anytime this thing hits you with a claw attack you must succeed on a dc18 constitution saving throw and if you fail you turn into a bean bag chair made of meat in this state you will of course be imposed with some difficulties such as a negative4 to your dexterity and disadvantage on all attack roles but that might be a good thing because you'll also spend every one of your turns in this form blindly attacking anything that gets close to you if you happen to be someone who possesses a strong enough sense sense of self you can reverse this horrible transformation by Landing a Charisma save at the end of your turn but even on a success you're only going to regain your true form for 1 minute since you have literally been infected with the Beast of bedlam's essence this is a permanent effect until someone casts lesser restoration or an equivalent type of Magic on you it is worth noting that both Stone skin and shape change have a unique interaction with this condition and that they allow you to maintain your proper form the duration of the spell so while not a permanent fix a casting of stone skin might be just what the cleric ordered at least until you can make your way to a temple or someone else that can cast true restoration on you or lesser restoration one of the Restorations if however you don't manage to regain your form either through magic or force of will you unfortunately will lose one point of wisdom for each round you spend in this amorphous form and if you lose all your wisdom un fortunately you are permanently transformed into a chaos beast that's right the black beast of bedum is the progenitor of every chaos beast at large so anytime you see a chaos Beast just know that it can trace its origin back to something a lot scarier not that they're not scary but it can always be worse speaking of being a lot scarier we haven't even talked about the beast's mockery trait yet this thing can mimic both humanoid voices and animal sounds it's heard which is creepy apparently they are also gifted ventriloquists because not only can they mimic these sounds but they can also make it seem as if they are coming from any point within 30 ft of them now obviously this is a really useful tool for setting up ambushes and messing with your opponents in various ways but the Beast of bedum cranks up the what the [ __ ] Factor by using this ability to mimic the voices of creatures it has previously slain it especially loves doing this in order to taunt others within the vicinity who may have known its last victim so that's cool emotional damage and speaking of speaking something else I find particularly disturbing about this monster is its purely malefic intellect they've an intelligent score of 16 which is well above your average humanoid and they can speak several languages among them common so you could totally have a conversation with this creature although I don't know if you'd like anything they have to say now onto the rest of the actions this creature has access to it can do plenty other things aside from just making a couple claw attacks it can use an ability once per day called the damning darkness which is basically just the darkness spell except it also does psychic damage to anyone caught in the area it also has the capacity to blast out a 20ft sphere of toxic gas centered on itself this is essentially just a casting of the cloud kill spell meaning it does a ton of poison damage to anybody caught within the eldrich first it's also got a handful of spells that augment its abilities and damage such as confusion detect evil and good shatter tongues and fantasmal killer oh and the skull almost forgot about that little tidbit earlier I mentioned that these things usually tow around a skull as a Grizzly Trophy and while they may be fond of using their mimicry ability to make the skull talk they can also use it as a Sonic emitter to unleash a horrifying Screech anyone within 60 ft who can hear the sound being emitted by this screaming skull has to make a saving throw and if they fail they are frightened of the Beast you know in case you needed another reason to be frightened of this thing and fortunately that essentially sums up all of the mechanical aspects of the black beast of bedum because it's intelligent it's got lots of options at its disposal for how it wants to operate it might attack stealthily from the shadows in a sort of Ambush or it might just burst in and start turning fools into flesh or orbs but whatever it chooses to do as the DM keep in mind that it is pretty intelligent so whatever schemes it comes up with it's not going to go off half coocked speaking of which let's talk about how we can actually use this thing at the game [Music] table so like any nest of goopy tentacles and tendrils the Beast of bedum can make for a great highlevel encounter your adventuring group coming across one of these things in a place like the abyss is an excellent way to Showcase that there are more things besides demons lurking in the dark either by itself or if you're feeling spicy accompanied by a group of chaos beasts this thing could make for a pretty good encounter or maybe it's just traveling with some demons or something and working with them to build a functioning portal to the material plane I've never met a horrible Elder goop monster whose minations weren't improved by the inclusion of demons I could also see a chaos Beast operating as a cult leader in the depths of a large city panning out in an interesting way maybe it's established itself a nice little chaos cult where it promises the cult members Transcendence from the prison of order and once a cultist proves themselves worthy to the cause the Beast of bedum uses its power to turn them into a chaos Beast now it's just biting its time building its ranks and forming a scheme that will allow it to send the city into chaos and corrupt as many living creatures as possible and I mean hey maybe it's not even the grand Puppet Master here perhaps the beast is just being used as a tool by an even more nefarious individual and if you don't love the cult idea perhaps this other individual is some kind of mad scientist type Wizard or artificer using the beate abilities to test the limits of humanoid physiology they could be up to all kinds of heinous body horror type experiments and then it just falls to the players to stop them maybe the party is even captured by this guy and in order to avoid becoming another one of his spongy amorphous experiments they must escape the mad scientist layer or perhaps it's something less overtly evil and this mad scientist character has merely found a way to harness the beast's power in order to change humanoid physiology in more subtle ways he could be running what is essentially a high concept Plastic Surgery Clinic using the beast's abilities to reshape faces and other body parts people in the city want changed in exchange for lots and lots of gold of course maybe the party decides to investigate this mysterious plastic surgeon who seemed to spring up out of nowhere only to find the Beast and it's trapped and it pleads with them for its freedom manipulating them into setting it free only to have the players unleash a true horror onto the city streets but at the end of the day this horrifying goop monster is great and I don't think we can ever have too many of those as always if you do want to use this monster Linked In the description down below is a Google Document which contains all of the information you will need to successfully run this creature at your game table and if you are one of my lovely patrons over the dungeon dad patreon page you can of course find the highres PDF stat block which is all the same information as what's in the Google Document it's just presented in a much nicer way and we've got some new original artwork over there as well which this week was done by the lovely Tam I will link to their art profile over on Twitter in the description down below so show them some love and thank you so much Tam for bringing this horrible nightmare creature to life speaking of patrons I also want to give a massive shout out to this week's patron of the week thank you so much to Jordan Canada as a fellow resident of this beautiful country it means the most to have your support Mr Canada I truly appreciate it and thank you for watching as always if you like what I'm doing here and you want to support the channel aside from patreon just liking the video leaving a comment that stuff helps me out tremendously and if there is a monster from a previous addition of D and D another tabletop roleplaying game or wherever that you would like to see converted into fifth edition and talked about on this channel let me know in the comments down below or over on the dungeon dad Discord which is also linked in the description Down Below in the monster suggestions Channel and who knows you might just see it show up on an episode of Monster of the week thank you guys so much for watching I also just want to give a quick I don't know teaser I think it's going to be next week's video it might be the one after that depending on how my time shakes out but there's a really big video coming I don't know it it might end up being over an hour it's technically going to be a monster of the week but it's going to be big so get ready for that I don't really know what I should say about it aside from it is about one of my favorite monsters that I've talked about before on this channel but they've suddenly become very relevant again in any case whether that ends up being next week or the week after I will'll see you in the next upload thank you for watching till then something about this statue gives me the creeps it might just be something about the way it looks or it could have something to do with the belt of petrified human hands around its waist next episode Blackstone gigant tune in next time for lots more fan service

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Id: wLXsCEhVuvE

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2024