D&D Story: "It's Watching You Right Now..." (False Hydra)
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- Опубліковано 4 жов 2024
- Hiya everyone,
I've made another creepy horror dnd story, this time focusing on one of the creepiest sessions of dnd I've ever run, where the party had to face a False Hydra. False Hydras are so much fun and might be my favorite creature I've ever run in dnd, but they require so much setup and work to make sure that they work well and aren't annoying. If you want to know more about what a false hydra is, then just watch the video I guess, lol, though I'm thinking about making a video about tips on running your own false hydra, but we'll see. Lastly, this video is the start of a new series about one of my favorite dnd campaigns, that somehow gets even crazier in the arcs after the party had dealt with the false hydra.
Now that I've finally made another creepy story, I'm kind of tempted to make a Call of Cthulhu story for my next rpg story, cause Call of Cthulhu is always a ton of fun (plus there's a significant lack of Call of Cthulhu stories on youtube)
Twitter: / thetoastthief
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Music Credits:
Teller of the Tales Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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#FalseHydra
![D&D Story: The False False-Hydra [Dragon Fangs Part 4]](/img/n.gif)
For anyone wondering (because I seem to have forgotten to explain it in the actual video, lol), the "health potions" that the players had been finding weren't actually health potions, but were instead the Player Character's minds trying to justify the healing they were getting from the forgotten bard throughout the campaign.
This is pretty sick of an idea
After seeing this used 3 times in other videos I've finally put it all together. Thanks for explaining.
Ahhhh, that makes sense.
Oooooooh now I get it
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh. That's awesome
“Is our window the only one that’s foggy?”
“Yes”
CHILLS
Jesus .........the chills
Running a campaign with the false hydra rn. Two of our players are a couple. When they got to the inn, the innkeeper left them a bowl filled with candy as a present. One them found a crayon drawing of a knight slaying a dragon and one of the party. The other carries a wooden sword in their inventory.
They don’t know that their son was the victim of a false hydra yet 😊
That's absolutely evil, I love it! :)
Did they ever figure that out?
@@sethmiles9436 yes! In fact once they figured out a false hydra was terrorizing the town they put 2 and 2 together pretty quickly. The party had to take a 30 minute break to process that bombshell.
@@lepatate3457 Now that they probably had time to sleep on it, what do they think about that plot? Are they still your friends?
This is so evil it makes me cry.
Niche situation, I know, but a further way to mess with the players if you're hosting and have a set gaming table. If you have a party that doesn't fill every seat at the table, keep the final seat set up from the start of the campaign with dice tray, blank journal, accoutrements, etc., everything the other players have, and say you just like to maintain the symmetry at the table. They'll forget about it eventually, maybe sometimes using it as a stash of extra dice or something. For the session that has the reveal of the FH, when the party discovers the killed party member's belongings, hand them the journal from the empty seat, one that you'd swapped with a used journal filled with that "PC"'s campaign notes. Bonus points if you prep a character sheet for them to find at that seat and a few other things to make that place at the table look lived in.
That's so evil, I love it!
I love the idea of having a secondary plot happening at the same time as the False Hydra plot. It complicates things and distracts the players so that not every moment is creeping dread, which just makes it all the worse when the horror rears its ugly heads.
The invisible bard thing is a GENIUS way to make a forgotten victim of the false hydra.
in ancient times villages kept a elder who would have their ears gouged out to protect the town from "something"
however these last couple years the family that performed this act could not concieve a child, and so we stopped doing the ritual.
Couldn't they just use something to block their ear instead of gouching out the ears... and like make it so each month they can change the one on duty
@@nguyendanhbang11a26 they didnt think of that.
A nest of them. False hydras waiting to hatch. There is no way to stop them. The village's fate has already been set.
1:40 that guy was deaf!!
Oh damn that's such a genius detail!
OH SHIT
This must be absolutely insane from his POV, like the scariest horror movie imaginable. People are getting eaten by these absolutely terrifying looking creatures and just straight up ignoring it, no matter how close they were to eachother... Imagine watching someone's wife getting eaten infront of them and they just... dont react... instead they just look at their ring finger with confusion
So if I'm understanding this right, this was planned for the party before they ever go to this town? If so, genius.
This is an old comment, but False Hydras are usually planned from the very start of a campaign.
@@lastboss4268 (old comment but wanted to reply) yes , i'm working on a campaign and now working to make a false hydra part... it's actually quiet hard but so enjoyable.
I know right 😍 DMs who play the long game are the best
I was in a false hydra campaign, I was the only one that knew what the name beforehand and I played it off as my character damaging her ears with explosion that let her see it for a moment. Eventually the DM had me randomly panic every so often and do impulsive stuff.
Gaslighting the monster.
I just realized that this story plays out almost EXACTLY like the original article sets up the monster, like word-for-word.
3:15 THE WINDOW
Health potions randomly falling out of enemies is just an rpg staple
I've added a lot of this to my Waterdeep campaign as an optional continuation once the main campaign is complete. It's been really cool setting up that feeling of unease in such a massive city.
It's so evil. Not the Hydra itsself. It is, but that's not what I'm talking about.
The implementation of a False Hydra, being done well, is evil. It requires you take something from the players they never knew they had. Something wholesome, and good. A sibling, a fellow party member. A child. It's gutwrenching.
I have heard several renditions of this story. This is def one of the best in terms of horror. The lurking unknown always hovering…
This story is amazingly creepy! I've only now learnt of the existence of this monster and I already love it. It's for sure one of the creepiest things I've ever seen in DnD so far. Just the fact that it could be anywhere, right next to you, but wou wouldn't notice. The little messages that you can't explain to yourself until it's too late. The growing distrust in your own brain. I find this type of story to be way scarier than simple blood and gore and murderers. And also, excellent planning!
Now, how do I get my DM to write a story like this...?
Gotta give it to you man this story was really great
Thanks!
The False Hydra causes situations eerily similar to Stephen King's IT. Love it
I really hope my players haven't seen this. I so want to run an adventure in my campaign about a similar town. This was creepy as hell!
Sometimes I feel a bit of solipsism despite the fact I know it's all in my head. That is the ONLY reason I started to catch on to what was going on.
i havent run a false hydra for my party (yet!) but i do actually have a quirk for doing horror rather well (one of my players even joked that i gave her a phobia)
my best way to do horror in game is to simply start throwing illusions or dreams around, as they work rather well. the key example of this was in a CoS game i ran years back with an old party. they were investigating an infamous place there (hint, teeth at the monument) and had decided to chase the sounds of children coming from the woods. looking back on it, all of them say they absolutely should not have done that and dont know why they did. me, in my indecision had decided that the forest was cursed to show your greatest fears when alone there, so naturally it took the gaggle of fools running in haphazardly one at a time.
one of them saw their family dead, another saw themselves rotting and stealing the health from their actual self, another saw their dead lover, and the lest was "buried alive". all of these were illusions to make you lose hope and make you weaker for the casters to take you, just brain melting stuff if you didnt know what was happening to you. the only reason i didnt actually wind up party wiping them with that was cause the player who saw their lover realized it was an illusion and broke out of it, the rest were harming themselves to get free of their prisons and pain.
so my best tip is become a horror podcaster, since it works really well lol
10:05 so while the dude was leaving to get the potions, that hydra head ate em
This is amazing. Gonna run a false hydra in my next campaign, for sure!
There's just one little detail I can't focus on, since I've seen it similar in other false hydra's stories.
If Oskoris got eaten (and so he got to be erased from everyone's mind) how could the party still be able to remember him and ask for him?
See, I know this is just a liiiiiittle thing in a terrific story, but I really haven't been able to justify it. I mean, it would be so freaking cool for the party not to find him while asking around, but I feel like this would be against the general idea and the abilities of the false hydra 🤔
I think that would be a matter of timing; once the party has figured out how to block the FH's song, remove the NPC while they're "off-camera". That way you can play that they never existed/you don't remember them, while their memories remain unaffected by the song.
First time Iran false Hydra I didn’t have the first disappearance be a secret party member (my players know that trope) but it was the mayor
They got a letter from the mayor of “town” to go investigate some weird disappearances
And when they got there turns out there isn’t a mayor
Hasn’t been for a little while now
I'm glad this was my introduction to the creature. Other explanations have no atmosphere.
imagine knowing your party and giving them pets and relative they would care about, it's just that somehow they instantly forgot about them cause of the beast's spell... it's heartbreaking
ooh nice! ive played a oneshot with the false hydra before and it was amazing! your build-up with the random potions and wounded enemies was amazing
My group is doing a thing where we have a caravan of sorts which allows all of us to have a pc, and when one person wants to Dm, they leave their character with the wagon so to speak, and take the reigns. I might run this and have my current character be held by the False Hydra. Maybe a merchant in town is selling his items.
I want your art in games and jeebus crisp, no one is safe...
If I can make a suggestion, while I love a lot of your stories I would love it if you could tell the story of a campaign from start to finish. Like break it up into parts and tell it.
I've actually got some good news for you! I plan on continuing the story of this campaign as a full series of videos!
Excuse me but *what the FUCK.*
Ok I'm good... I think... I think I peed a little. I may or may not sleep tonight.
that's fucking awesome. totally going to use this baddie in some way... not sure how yet, but potentially a cult
A cult would be so cool! I'm thinking of doing something like that too, with my new group as a way to introduce them to the False Hydra
Im running a false hydra in my campaign currently and I actually used a similar forgotten bard idea, but its mysterious random inspiration too
Just the intro got me really intrigued
This is sooo good. Questions though, did you create the sister and the pet for this specific adventure (the players actually really had never heard of them before) or are they ongoing NPCs that died in this adventure?
How much did the players push back when you kept correcting the things they knew were true (even if the PCs didnt), like with the inn keepers?
By the sound of it it had been set up way in advance, that's why they'd had an inexplicable bardic inspiration all campaign.
He’d have to create them. Remember the sister was “alive” during the entire game before this. Everything they saw was explained and lead up to the sister dying. You can’t have an npc with the party the whole time then have them die and have the party forget and not use meta knowledge. So you make buts and pieces that go along with the character always planning to go to the false hydra city and kill them.
Thank you for posting this, I've been able to incorporate several elements into my own game. Things are rapidly shifting from ominous to suspicious, I really hope I get to use the fogged window.
It’s hard to make these kinds of things with my group because I’m pretty sure we are all on a similar YT algorithm.
Yeah that's the biggest issue with the False Hydra honestly, however it does give you the potential to run a weird modified version of the false hydra and then if the party thinks its a normal false hydra it'll throw them off.
Like for example I've had an idea running in my head for a while of a single-headed humanoid false hydra who follows the party around on all their adventures, and you can only remember it exists while seeing it in a reflection (like in weapon glints, shiny ale mugs, windows, etc.)
I've also got a reverse false hydra that I ran a little bit ago which the community has started calling The Liar's Tower which could be fun to run as well (It's the video titled "None of this is real" from my series named "The Island" if you want to check it out)
You’re channel is severely underrated.
Wow That is a great Story, thanks for sharing!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I freaking love this story, it was amazingly written, keeping me on my toes the whole time, incredible
The false hydra has disturbed me more then any other monster since i found it, and i think its because it plays on the fear of being forgotten
That plus the fear you can't even trust yourself and your own mind to know the truth
Its amazing, I was looking for ideas to run this campaign and found this masterpiece, i have a question tho, how many heads does the hydra had? because its harder if has more heads no?
The false hydra starts its attack with one head, and for every day the party doesn't find and kill that sucker, it grows two more heads. It's maximum that it can grow is one OG head and six AUX heads
It depends on who's writing the statblock I believe. But the best one imo is the one on the "Monster of the Week" series cause it gives you the ENTIRE lore and ecology of the creature
It starts off as basically just a little slug with a single head. The more it feeds, the stronger it gets and the more heads it grows (how much time/feeding it takes per new head depends on the statblock and/or GM discretion).
Once it grows a seventh head, it switches tactics. Instead of its song forcing you to ignore it and its victims, its singing now acts as a _dominate person_ spell on everyone who hears it. It compels them to round up anyone who resists its domination so it can eat them... and then makes its new thralls carry it to another city so that it can continue its gluttonous reign of terror.
It's not necessarily harder to kill with more heads, just easier to kill with less. Set the FH's save DC to what's reasonable for your PCs -1/2 to DC per head lopped off in combat.
As DM, consider how strong your PCs are, how strong to make your FH so it's not a pushover or OP, and most importantly how much of a battle thematically have you built this moment to be?
If it's just the monster of the week to fill a session or two give it 3-5 heads and call it a day.
If this is a frequented or loved location and you've been laying ground work for in-game weeks/months with a heart retching reveal of who your PCs forgot make it massive with 30-50 heads, with faces like monstrous versions of those it's consumed.
Just make the HP stat the same so taking 3-5 heads and some body blows kills it. It's a stealth predator because regardless of size it's soft and killable
I love how you start and stop the music throughout this! The storytelling in this video is phenomenal, I definitely need to give my players a false hydra
Yeah, the problem with the false Hydra Is that if a player knows about It, the party will stream roll the campain
I've heard a few variations of the False Hydra setup. This sounds like three stories I've heard mashed into one.
The false hydra is described like the thing I saw in my window. ( I saw something staring at me from my window once. )
😅
Uh oh
I hope you have moved out from the city
Just found your channel! Wow! Good job! Just subscribed.
Saw you have low views but maybe a good idea would be taking reddit stories and animating them in this 8bit style? It may get more views
If I ever become a DM, I'm gaslighting my players with this.
Think it would be fun to introduce a named troll npc that early on in the campaign your players struggle to defeat and later on when they're like level 14 introduce him again but weaker but still long enough to kill an unprepared adventurer and then when their level 20 at the end of the campaign have them fight the troll in its strongest form reminding them of the first time they and the troll clashed kind of like nemesis from resident evil 3
To be fair they should still be able to read the note, the guy who wrote it would just insist the writing they see isn't there. Otherwise the journal and note on the skin wouldn't be readable to the party, yeah?
It’s a mental block kinda thing. You can’t see what the hydra doesn’t want you to
@@sourplayer2936 sure but it doesn't make sense that you'd be able to read messages from yourself but not others. If anything I'd expect the reverse, since you don't know 100% what the other person was talking about but your own brain knows what your other brain was talking about. Also if you couldn't see the message from the npc anymore then by the rules of it, you wouldn't remember it.
@@TehSlan you got a good point there
Since four is the "standard" number, I kept checking and double checking the five part members at the start of the video, thinking one of them would might be the one to disappear without you pointing it out.
Man... That was scary
I've been watching videos about the False Hydra and taking notes. I've never DMed before, but I hope at some point down the line to DM a False Hydra oneshot for my friends, cause I have so many cool ideas on how to it.
9:13 I’ll be honest, I did plug my ears for a sec at this
This is cool animation.
That was out standing!
Was this played on Roll20? I ask because the editing of a handout after it has been handed out is hard to do otherwise.
Yep, it was on Roll20! The ability to change handouts is the one thing I'm going to miss when I eventually am able to play in person games again ;-;
@@TheToastThief I posted on an older video of yours about an undead dungeon, did you get that one?
Time to be a traumatizing DM!
Underrated Channel
This is amazing 🤩
this is terrifying
I stumbled across this amazing story 'cause, you can guess, i'd like to create a mini campain around a false hydra. My question is "how could you manage the bard during the story progression?" I mean, the party arrives in the town together with the bard and only several session later it disappears, so the players are all well aware of the presence of that character...
You basically have to write the campaign around the party eventually coming to the town where the bard gets eaten.
Instead of saying "Here's a bard NPC to help you out, oh wait you don't remember a bard at all now that you're in this one town", you have to implement things like "enemies just drop lots of healing potions" or "you always wake up with an inspiration die because I'm the GM and I said so", then reveal later on _why_ they were getting those benefits.
Wait I just realised, was the Westbound Imperium trying to kill the hydra?
that or if it was a mature hydra then there's always the possibility that they where the ones that brought the hydra to the town from a previous one.
If they were deaf yeah or they saw it from far away
NOT THE BEAR COMPANION TOO 😭
Why would it effect the note but not all the books? Seems inconsistent
Not Bimmy nooooooooo
You should make your own game
False Hydra are so fucking cool I really want to run one
Oozian rogue? Is that a COFSA race I see?
COFSA?
@@llewelynshingler2173 Compendium of Forgotten Secrets Awakening
Cool animations 👍
Memory magic is freeky
If the PCs manage to Raise Dead or Reincarnate some of the dead, do the memories of them return? Or would they stay erased? How would you handle that?
The disappearing text doesnt make sense though as the author wasnt killed by the false hydra yet, and the potions falling out of enemies doesnt really either.
The potions and unexplained damage were from the bard they don't remember. I don't know about the text because the other warnings aren't hidden
the text disappeared bc they were now under the influence of the false hydra's song.
Also, interesting how they censored this one to make it mor like a Sarlak so as not to traumatize his kid.
Excellent.
Could you try different voices for different characters? I think that would help.
this is amazing. any chance you can share the statblock?
Im curious how you'd run a pc getting devoured in this, because it would be hard not to meta game at that point. Maybe just exclude that player and say they were busy for those sessions
There is a built-in mechanic for it in one version, that being that it’s possible to resist the forgetting with a DC15 wisdom save
Given the context I don’t think it would be too hard to just hand wave everyone making the save and just forgetting having to make it in the first place
I'm not sure you would _want_ to do that, unless the player is looking to reroll anyway. Otherwise you're ending their game unilaterally by killing their PC.
What's with the potions I don't get that part???
It was their minds trying to justify the healing they were getting, while gaslighting them out of remembering the eaten cleric
@@surealitycomplex4077 👍
i want to put this in my campaign but its so hard to do it(1st time dming btw)
How did you make Blimmy the Bear blink out of existance if he was a companion since the third session? Other than that, I think this is a great story
The only thing that I would add to an encounter like this is a magic item that protects memories, its easy to explain away an NPCs memories, but it would be much more difficult to explain away the existance of NPCs that players knew from previous session, especially before the party is introduced to the monster
Blimmy the bear was simply never mentioned.
From the beginning.
They were retconned in, even though there were clues that there were more people than they were.
Whether that took the form of randomly damaged enemies being torn by its claws or someone in the party having an unexpectedly ravenous appetite.
The bear was there all along, and this was the reveal. The bear was simply never remembered until this point.
Effectively, it didn't exist until the false hydra was dead.
Im making a one shot that can lead into more for my girlfriends sister, her boyfriend and maybe my girlfriend if she gets the urge to play. As of right now their just gonna fight some rats and a group of goblins (first game ever, just want them to learn) and then second session will be against some scarecrows. But I do want to implement a false hydra once they learn how the game works and understand seperating themselves from their characters. This also will be my first time ever playing or Dming so i want to give myself a bit of time to fully learn before I delve into something like this so any tips from people who have run a FH would be greatly appreciated
Это просто офигенно! Cool
why did the health potion drop for no reason? (genuine question)
I love this
Oooo... mind if i borrow some of this?
Easy out boo giving them a book one the monster
Huh, weird. Story sounds a lot like a reddit post I read a while ago.
Im planning on running a false hydra one shot and i was wondering what level your PCs were during this encounter?
so im still a little confused, what is it with the health potions?
An even more dangerous foe?
what were the hydra stats?
Wait, so before arriving into town you made sure they "got health potions" and got the bardic inspiration? Doesn't that raise questions?
Or at the Inn at the start, why did the bar keep immediately ask about 6? during that second did they lose the bard?
It's a way you could incorporate into roleplay them having forgotten the bard
What's the explanation for health potions randomly appearing inside corpses? o.o
Like... is this just a "lol you guys will need this" or is there an actual lore reason for it?
They REMEMBER finding potions to explain the healing they got form a party member who has since been eaten by the false hydra
You know? My dream for D&D is to have so much charisma to the point where I can say the most stupid shit and people will believe me.
Why would you ever do something so sad as killing off a loved one of someone who can't even remember them? This creature is beyond evil. It's completely amoral. Even devils and demons would want to purge reality of these creatures.
It is entirely possible that false hydras are just animals. However, even if they aren’t, they still need to eat and have no way of knowing that their victims are related to other people.
...if the singing stopping let people remember enough to write panicked messages or say things like "IT ATE HER" over and over, why wouldn't the town remember what they'd been rescued from?
Why would the party catch the innkeeper saying "the six of you" if there WERE six at the time? The singing wouldn't delete somebody yet to be missing. They should perceive "5" because there's nothing to warn them yet. The reveal about the backpack is good, though.
I would say the Innkeeper slip-up is a creative liberty that the DM may take. Having a missing party member is a massive twist, but it's impossible to pull off if the players KNOW beforehand that there's a missing member. But you can still drop hints for perceptive players to figure out what exactly is wrong if they pay enough attention, while still treating earlier segments of the story prior to their disappearance as the collective memories of the party leading up to the actual moment of disappearance. You can simply assume the party played through their past memories which were modified by the Hydra to explain the hiccups and inconsistencies in how the NPC's act and what they say, because a False Hydra's memory alteration is not 100% perfect and everyone's brain still has a small part of it locked away by the singing that is desperately trying to warn the main consciousness of the real danger, which interferes with the Hydra's memory alteration.
@@Lazarultos Might work if you somehow play it out as a flashback. The hydra's edit removes the sixth person, already gone by the time the flashback is occurring, but doesn't alter what the innkeeper is remembered to have said. Would need a good reason why his specific words stuck with them, though, because usually people don't remember verbatim, but instead remember the idea of what happened. "Innkeeper set up rooms for all of us" is likely the fidelity for most; the fact that he mentioned the specific number likely only comes up if there's a reason that was important.
Wow. This entire thing down to the playe's responses was just ripped wholesale. I didnt doubt that this was a game you actually ran until the player responses were literally word for word replicas of other versions of the story posted way before yours.
It took me a second to see it, but when I did, the CHILLS 3:16
“The six of you are free to stay the night.”
“Don’t you mean five?”
“Oh… oh yes…”
😳