The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

OK, I learned something cool today. As I read the description of the dullahan in Ezmerelda’s Guide to Ravenloft—“Dullahans are headless undead warriors—the remains of villains who let vengeance consume them. These decapitated hunters haunt the areas where they were slain, butchering innocents in search of their severed heads or to quench their thirst for revenge”—my thoughts immediately went to Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in which the legendary “headless horseman” was said to be a former Hessian auxiliary soldier beheaded by a cannon shot during the American Revolution, prowling the area around the battlefield where he fell. But it turns out that this was already a longstanding mythical trope even in Irving’s time, found in tales from the Rhineland region of Germany (which includes the region of Hesse!) and the British Isles—and in the Irish version of the trope, the undead warrior is called a dulachán, anglicized as “dullahan.”

There’s a lot of fun to be found in mashing up creature types: crossing dragons and undead to create the dracolich, or fiends and constructs to create the hellfire engine, or—as Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons did—dragons and aberrations to create the eyedrake and the elder brain dragon. Ezmerelda’s Guide to Ravenloft gives us a few of these, including today’s featured creature, the vampiric mind flayer.

Comparing and contrasting the vampiric mind flayer with the stat blocks of the stock vampire and the stock mind flayer is the obvious exercise. However, when you look at the flavor text and see how these beasties are created (summary: not vampirism-infected adult mind flayers, but vampirism-infected mind flayer larvae), vampire spawn seem like a better analogue than full-fledged vampires, so we need to throw them into the mix as well.

The results of the comparison are … interesting. And a little odd. The result isn’t a simple average of the vampire (or vampire spawn) and the mind flayer, nor is it the sum of its parts. It’s both a little more and a little less than either.

The brain in a jar—literally, exactly what it is—poses several interesting problems, along with a few unanswered questions.

For one thing, is the “natural armor” that gives it an Armor Class of 11 supposed to be the glass of the jar? We have to assume so, because a naked brain with a −4 Dexterity modifier would have to have some ankylosaurus-grade armor plating to give it AC 11. However, according to the Object Armor Class table in chapter 8 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, a glass jar ought to have AC 13. At the same time, 55 hp is absurdly durable for even a resilient object of Small size.