Meditations on Hydras

False Hydra is a relatively (in)famous monster thought up by Goblin Punch. It is a challenge to fight not because of stats, but due to its insidious ability to affect the minds of those around it - players and NPCs alike. Today I’d like to expand this family of monsters a bit by proposing more hydra variants.

As usual, if you are confused about any terms, make sure to check out the glossary, and if you are looking for other posts, check out the blog map. If you want to read more on this subject, Snuggly Serials has written an article going into more details about Hydra ecology and cultural responses to their presence.

False Hydra recap

To recap what a false hydra is, it is a slowly growing monster that infests a town. It’s singing makes people forget it is there: you could be staring straight at it and not realize it. It also warps the memories of people to make them forget inconsistencies in their environment, such as the people it ate no longer being around.

There are two big challenges in fighting a False Hydra. First of all, you have to realize that there is something to fight in the first place: if your players are physically present in the town, they are also under the effect of its magic. And secondly, you have to find and hit the Hydra, which is all but imperceptible.

Because False Hydra directly acts on the minds of those affected, it is a very unique challenge among the roster of TTRPG monsters. It will make your players extremely paranoid, and it is likely that many groups will not be able to come up with a solution at all.

True Hydra

True Hydra is an inverse of the False Hydra. Where False Hydra hides itself in the dark corners of your consciousness, True Hydra floods all your senses with information, blinding you to where it actually is. You won’t miss a True Hydra, but that doesn’t mean you will find it.

Similarly to a False Hydra, a True Hydra sings, but its song adds instead of removing. Its victims see Hydra heads everywhere: in every reflection, poking out from every hole, snaking around from behind their backs. They hear its grinding teeth from every direction, smell its sickening sweat in every room. At later stages of the infestation, they can’t even see the floor, only a mass of twisting Hydra necks. One of those images may be an actual Hydra; but you will not know which one.

When a True Hydra is young, it uses this ability sparingly: focusing on single victims and using the fear of a monster that isn’t there to lead them straight into its jaws. It will attack only at night, and target those who are already close to its lair and who will not be missed. Without the cloaking ability of its sibling it has to be much more careful.

It does have some unique advantages, though. Even from a very young age, its singing affects equilibrioception: your sense of balance. By making tiny adjustments to it, it can make you walk in circles if you do not know exactly where you are going. Anyone who finds themselves lost in the wilderness nearby will soon make their way back to town. Drunkards walking outside after dark will be drawn in towards its lair unerringly, like ants falling into an antlion pit.

Of course, this ability will not do much to those who follow the roads or navigate using the sun or the stars: keeping a straight path is not difficult with external waypoints.

True Hydra infestation can be split into four stages. In the first one, Hydra lies low and tries to remain concealed while it picks off whomever it can. Eventually, it will get noticed: this is where it transitions into a second stage, making illusory attacks happen all across town to conceal its true lair. Hydra can also manipulate various monsters, drawing them out of the dungeons underneath the city with strategic use of illusions. If a pack of ghouls attacks a market, nobody will suspect a Hydra, and it would not be suspicious if a couple corpses go missing in the process. And if you were looking into a recent series of missing persons, well, it was probably these same ghouls to blame.

All the while, the beast bides its time, gathering power and strength. Once it is strong enough, it abruptly transitions into the third stage, and sings its strongest song yet.

Anyone trying to leave town will be blinded by images of Hydra flooding their sight, thoroughly blinding them. The trap slams shut: you cannot follow the road out of town if you cannot see the road, and if you cannot follow the road, Hydra will not let you leave. Everyone that is in town when this happens will be trapped until the inevitable conclusion of the events.

Cunning players may try to find ways out of the trap. For example, they could try to crawl along the ground, feeling where the road is with their touch. The Hydra will not let them, however: by scaring animals or monsters, it will make them run over the escaping people. It doesn’t need to kill them: it just needs to get them off the road. As soon as you don’t know exactly where you are, it can lead you back into the town.

Most of Hydra’s strength is spent on keeping the town contained: within the town itself, its projections will not be so powerful. It is still possible to find and kill its true body. But the longer this takes, the stronger the Hydra grows. If you let it get to the fourth stage of the infestation, you are truly doomed: it will flood all your senses, vision, hearing, touch, and eat you at its leisure.

False False Hydra

Some people think that if only you knew about the existence of a False Hydra in advance, you could easily deal with it. After all, all you need are some standard operating procedures concerning memory erasure - nothing that a sufficiently clever reader of SCP fiction could not come up with. Unfortunately, this simply leads you into the teeth of a False False Hydra.

False False Hydra pretends to be a False Hydra, but it is actually anything but. Where False Hydra makes you forget about people, evidence, or events that would lead you to the False Hydra, False False Hydra inserts new, fleeting, memories into your head of people or events that have never existed. Those memories fade, just like the true memories False Hydra erases: harmless on their own, but deadly if you think that any fading memory is a critical clue.

Of course, False False Hydra also uses its abilities to feed. A false memory of your spouse calling you from an alley will make you walk in there without suspecting anything. By repeatedly inserting a similar memory into someone’s head, it can, over time, build up a feeling that some unexplained event had an explanation, and they simply forgot it. After all, they will not forget any conclusions they drew from a memory that they forgot. How very convenient.

In combat, false memories have a limited use; but they can send combatants off balance, or fool their senses similarly to a True Hydra.

Unlike a False Hydra, a False False Hydra has weak abilities to pacify the population; unlike a True Hydra, it cannot prevent them from fleeing. Because of this, a False False Hydra will act carefully, and build up pretext for people going missing before striking. It will manipulate the town’s government by inserting key memories, make police throw cases into the “solved” pile, and tarnish the players’ reputations by making everyone feel that there was something really fucked up about them, even though nobody can quite remember what. False False Hydra is an absolute master of the rumor mill, and will use it to its advantage.

If you want to fight a False False Hydra, you need to make sure that everything you believe has a very solid basis in verifiable facts. Of course, that exact strategy will be deadly when dealing with a False Hydra. You better hope you will not face both of these monsters at once.

Fast Hydra

False Hydra slowly pushes at your memories, gradually affecting them over a long time. Its cousin, Fast Hydra, is much more direct. Instead of affecting memories, it simply prevents memory consolidation around any facts associated with itself. You can keep ideas about it in your working memory, but they will never reach your long term memory. To put it simply, you can think about the Fast Hydra as long as you are looking directly at it; but look away for just a minute, and you will forget it was ever there, just how you forget the faces of hundreds of people you pass on the street every day.

Compared to False Hydra, Fast Hydra’s cloaking abilities are much weaker. It cannot do the subtle process of purging incongruent memories with its song; and if someone looks directly at it, it has no protection at all. What it lacks in cloaking, however, it more than makes up for in mobility. Unlike a False Hydra, Fast Hydra is mobile right away, and is much stronger in a fight. 

Because of how quickly its song erases its presence, it can be more aggressive than its cousin: attacking in the open, without waiting for openings. If a fight goes bad, it will retreat, and come back for another try once its victims have forgotten all about it. It is as large and quick as a horse: built to hit hard and retreat quickly. It is a perfect hit and run predator.

It would be quite easy for your players to figure out that something is killing people in town. Town will figure this out too, in fact. But finding and killing the Fast Hydra is no easy feat. Getting reliable information on its abilities and location is almost impossible: your memories are no good, and you cannot write down much before your memories fade entirely. Fumble with the pencil and all those observations are gone, never to return. And even assuming you wrote something down, to keep it in your head you will have to constantly recite it, or it will simply slide off your mind like water off a duck. Even coordinating a search will be extremely difficult, when any distraction threatens to make people forget what they were supposed to be doing.

False Hydra has similar effects, of course; but what False Hydra can do in a day, Fast Hydra can do in a hot minute.

When you are tracking down a Fast Hydra, you have to be prepared to retread the same line of thought again and again and again, at speed, and to make the same conclusion every time. You will remember that people are missing, you will remember that you don’t know what kills them, so you must conclude you are on the search for the murderer. A mind less than perfectly dedicated to the task will not be able to deal with the threat, and will, inevitably, get eaten.

Face Hydra

Hydras are a difficult threat to face, but at the very least you can rely on one another. Humans can band together, and find a solution. Not so for a Face Hydra.

When a Face Hydra shows up in town, there is a sudden outbreak of face blindness. Random individuals stop being able to recognize human faces, and distinguish people from one another.

It starts out fairly mild: you get worse at remembering the faces of strangers. Then you forget the face of your best friend. Finally, even your close family looks strange and unfamiliar, their faces blending into one another. The next thing to go are voices: everybody starts to sound the same, and you lose your last handle on human identity. Finally, you even lose your ability to read emotions from people. A passive aggressive insult can be heard as a joke, or vice versa.

This affliction does not affect everyone equally: at first town’s medics will no doubt suspect it is some kind of virus or poison. They are wrong, of course: it is the presence of a Face Hydra.

Face Hydra itself is nothing special. It is a gaunt humanoid around 7 feet tall, with bleach white skin, a mouth too full of teeth, and enormous eyes. It can speak, though its voice is rasping and unmistakably inhuman. In a fight, it is stronger than a person, but not by much: two or three people can easily put it down.

Initially, Face Hydra will hide. Out of all Hydras, it is the most secretive, attacking only to stave off hunger. Only once the cases of face blindness have spread throughout town will it step up its schedule.

Of course there will be sightings of it around town. Maybe some people will even escape from its clutches. But they will be dismissed as cranks: Face Hydra makes sure that those it meets are affected by the face blindness the most. To those it faced, everyone will look and sound like Face Hydra: at which point, the sighting will be nothing but noise among the overall chaos.

The real threat when faced with a Face Hydra is not the Face Hydra, but the people around you. Without identities, crime will radically increase; without emotional understanding, any random interaction could break out into a fight. Who robbed a shopkeeper last night? A gaunt man with big eyes; it could be anyone.

On its own, this may not break down societal trust that much. But once the news spreads that one person who looks like that kills people, your society will be in freefall. If you are afflicted by face blindness, then any time you meet a person you will think - will they eat me? Sure it’s unlikely, but humans like to stress out about small chances of death. Maybe you will try to walk everywhere in pairs, but can you really keep track of one another all day? If your partner went into another room, who came back - them or the real Face Hydra?

Some people will flee the town. Face Hydra will not stop them: everybody will not flee, and there is enough meat for it to feast on. After several weeks or months, their vision will come back. 

Most of the other Hydras are animalistic in intelligence. Face Hydra, however, is quite smart: it can wear human clothing, use tools, and otherwise blend in with society. The key to fighting it is to catch on to what is happening early: if you can organize the townsfolk, then finding it isn’t that difficult. But if the infestation gets bad enough, it will become almost impossible to distinguish it from all the other people in town. At that point, it’s almost hopeless.

Fool’s Hydra

Not all hydras are dangerous. Some, such as a Fool’s Hydra, are quite benign.

Fool’s Hydra’s body is quite small: only as large as a cat. It has several necks, never less than two, which can be as long as two dozen meters. It can be usually found in forests, where it preys on smaller animals, such as birds. It cannot move its main body quickly, and so has to hunt from ambush, making its nest near watering holes or animal paths.

In truth, Fool’s Hydra is quite vulnerable: without an ability to move, it could be easily killed by any large predator, such as a wolf or a bear, let alone a human. To defend itself, it pretends to be a True Hydra, making illusions of many snapping heads, far more than it actually possesses.

Some theorize that Fool’s Hydra is an adolescent form of a True Hydra. Nobody has been able to confirm this, however; whether that means it is false or that True Hydra ate them is anyone’s guess.

If you see twenty long necks suddenly extend out of a bush, then chances are, it is a Fool’s Hydra and you are safe. But would you want to risk it?

Think Hydra

False Hydra hides itself passively: it erases all knowledge of its existence, but does not do anything beyond that. If you try to find it with some clever scheme, it will not hide away. But there is another way to hide: an active one, to try and predict where your hunters will look and not be there when they do.

Think Hydra uses just such a strategy. If you know about the Think Hydra - if you have seen it, or have gathered enough evidence to put it as your primary suspect - then Think Hydra knows about you. While you are thinking about it, it can see through your eyes; and even when you are not, it can tell where you are located.

Of course, on its own, that isn’t a great defense. As soon as someone noticed the first incident, it would only be a matter of time until the hunters would find and kill the Hydra. But Think Hydra, unique of all its siblings, can dig. Not very quickly: it can move perhaps a foot per minute. But that is enough.

Its main body looks like a mole, up to two meters long. Where a normal mole would have a face, Hydra has a cluster of necks, with older ones having more of them, and longer necks. Initially, much as the other Hydras, Think Hydra will only hunt at night. But once it is noticed, it will grow bolder: after all, the more people know about it, the better it can hide.

If Think Hydra suspects it is about to be discovered, it will retract its heads, and start to dig away. In an hour of digging, it will only move 12 meters: less than a city block. In a day, only about 300 meters. But the truth is, it doesn’t need to go that far. A human with a shovel will take ten times as long, or more, to dig the same distance. If you let it get away, you will barely be able to catch up.

When Think Hydra thinks that it is safe, it will construct an underground chamber: large enough to fit its body and all the heads. After the construction is finished, it will burrow its heads up to the surface and begin hunting. To protect itself against intrusion, Hydra may keep a couple heads back for defense.

The main weakness of a Think Hydra is that, ironically, it is quite dumb. It cannot read, and does not understand human language. While it can see through your eyes, and has a keen spatial awareness, it will not be on guard for clever tactics. If you manage to get a squad of diggers together, and tell them where to dig without explaining anything about the Hydra, then they could manage to excavate down to its chamber before it gets away. But doing so is tricky.

Another option would be to go for the heads - after all, the Hydra can bleed out. But to do so without alerting the Hydra is, perhaps, even more challenging.

Festering Hydra

Other Hydras are, fundamentally, just a monster. As long as you find the body and stab it enough, it will die. Not so for a Festering Hydra.

Festering Hydra starts out as a pale hairy carpet similar to a mold, and grows from there. Initially, it is ignored the same as a False Hydra, with the strength of the effect proportional to the size of the patch. For a small one, it is enough to ward off passing glances, but not a directed search. But as the patch grows, so will the gaps in your senses. Eventually, you will forget that the things the mold covers exist at all.

Once the patch runs out of nutrients to grow further, it changes tracks. The memory effect drops off at once: you suddenly see the mold everywhere, on your furniture, clothes, food, even growing on your skin. With panicked realization, you will rush out to get help, to remove this corruption at once. But in doing so, you are only helping the Hydra.

Once the Hydra removes the memory effect from you, you become its carrier. For the next week, anything you touch or even come close to will grow more patches of the Hydra. You will ignore those additional patches: only the original one has dropped the antimemetic effect. In your panic you will become a perfect spore for the Hydra, spreading it all around the city. Of course, anyone else you bring in - anyone that sees the mold in all its glory - will spread it too.

Smaller patches of Festering Hydra are not directly dangerous. As they grow they will begin to manifest the heads that are so typical of the Hydra family; and yes, those heads will eat people. Their corpses will provide valuable nutrients to further grow the mold.

Properly exterminating a Festering Hydra is extremely difficult. Not only do you have to find all the patches; you also have to make sure you do not create any new ones in the process. If it spreads enough, your only recourse may be to burn the whole town to the ground; of course, convincing the residents that this is necessary will not be so easy. Your only saving grace is that once you become a carrier - and your week of infectiousness ends - you will not spread the mold further, no matter how many times you see it. Of course, this immunity may fade over time…

If you get news of a Festering Hydra infestation, move quickly and contain the spread - by any means necessary.

Hopefully some of these monsters will prove helpful to fellow GMs in their quest to terrify their players. If you want to read more on this subject, Snuggly Serials has written an article going into more details about Hydra ecology and cultural responses to their presence.

If you are looking for other posts on my blog, check out this list of all other posts, and if you enjoy what I write, you can subscribe to receive updates by email:

Thumbnail art is based on Hydra de Lerna, which is in the public domain.