Given a choice between, say, a character with Intelligence 18 and Wisdom 14 and one with Intelligence 16 and Wisdom 10, an adult oblex will weigh the risk against the reward and may prefer the latter.
It’s up to you, as the dungeon master, to decide whether it needs to observe the PCs and NPCs for a while to pick out the most intelligent among them or whether it can just sense the rich, delicious complexity in their brainwave patterns.Īctually, the ideal victim is a PC or NPC with high Intelligence and low Wisdom.
“The sharper the mind, the better the meal,” says Mordenkainen’s, so the adult oblex zeroes in on the player character or non-player character with the highest Intelligence in the area. The primary benefit of the latter is its skill at Deception, which is to say, impersonation of the people whose memories it’s consumed in the past. It possesses extraordinary Dexterity and Intelligence and very high Constitution and Charisma. The adult oblex is the basic form, and it’s much tougher than the spawn. Oblex spawn are intelligent enough to Disengage, but they’re so slow that doing so only hinders them further. Even a single point of fire damage will prompt the oblex spawn to Dash away, as will being moderately wounded (reduced to 12 hp or fewer). If an enemy does engage an oblex spawn in melee, it will fight back, whomping the meddler with a pseudopod-but not if its attacker does fire damage to it. Instead, their goal is to avoid engagement and get someplace safe where they can grow, as quickly as they can manage. Oblex spawn can’t consume memories themselves yet, so they won’t engage in combat if they can help it.
The oblex spawn is the simplest and weakest form of the oblex, produced when a greater oblex becomes too full of memories and needs to shed a few. Finally, they all have Aversion to Fire and immunity to several debilitating conditions, four of which are fairly self-evident based on their oozy nature (the charmed condition is the fifth).
They’re all Amorphous, able to slip through cracks as narrow as 1 inch wide (the text specifically says “without squeezing,” which I take to mean-based on “Squeezing Into a Smaller Space” on page 192 of the Player’s Handbook-that passing through such a crack doesn’t slow them down at all or penalize them on attacks or Dexterity saving throws, nor does it grant opponents advantage on attacks against them). Nighttime suits them, as do subterranean environments. They also have 60 feet of blindsight, meaning that even when they take an apparently humanoid form, they have eyes in the back of their heads, figuratively speaking, and can zero in on their victims even in absolute darkness. What they really are is quasi-brutes with Dexterity- and Intelligence-based rather than Strength-based attacks and a keen sense of their opponents’ weaknesses.
Dexterity plus Constitution usually means “skirmisher,” but oozes can’t move fast enough to skirmish. Oblexes/oblices have an unusual ability contour, with peaks in Dexterity, Constitution and Intelligence. There’s also a curious choice of wording in the Eat Memories feature that makes me wonder whether an oblex has any good reason to use it more than once per target. It’s the memories that power them, not the physical substance of their victims. Furthermore, it’s not clear that they have any compelling reason to. They can kill their victims, but they don’t need to. The main reason I think oblexes (I feel like the plural should be “oblices”) are more creepy than scary is that they don’t need to kill their victims to consume their memories. On D&D Beyond, Jeremy Crawford recently characterized the oblex as “D&D’s new scariest monster.” Is it? I’m not convinced that it’s the scariest, in terms of the degree of threat it poses-but I would say it’s one of the creepiest. Using your investigative skills, hacking abilities, and the victim's influencer network, it's up to you to piece together the victim’s past.More from Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes: After the abishai, the next two requests I got were for the oblex, a slime-creature created out of mind flayer experimentation which feeds off humanoids’ memories. He recruits your help in investigating the case, and hands you a crucial piece of evidence the victim’s phone. But Detective Murilo suspects that something is amiss. The follow-up to the critically acclaimed SIMULACRA, SIMULACRA 2 expands on the found phone horror format with inventive new apps, a more complex narrative, a larger live-action cast, and a deeper look into the darker side of the internet.Ī young social media influencer's untimely – and unnatural – death is being ruled as an accident.