Chthonic squid monsters floating soundlessly through the Inverted Palace. Conical indigo bodies ringed with crimson eyes; dense membrane webbing chitin-barbed tentacles. In sharp contrast to their gloomy exterior, a darkmantle's underside is a riot of flaming, ghastly hues.
Darkmantles hover ominously in corridors or high above spacious chambers until they detect the mental thrum of potential prey. They dart through the air with surprising speed and latch themselves to a victim, engulfing their head and upper torso in membranous embrace.
While attached, a darkmantle shoots slender dendron-shaped tendrils into the nose and ears of the victim to hijack their synapses while a subliminally active display pulses across their ventral surface, psychically imprinting an egg in the victim's mental substrata. During this process, the darkmantle will defend itself and the victim by lashing at oncoming threats with its tentacles.
HD 4+1 AC 5 Att. Engulf, Tentacle x 4 (1d6) Move: 180'(60') fly Morale: 7 Alignment: Chaotic Number Appearing: 1d3
- Engulf: engulfed creatures can move but not see or attack. They must save vs. spells each round to mentally resist the darkmantle's egg. A helmet grants +2 to the save, and a Helmet of Telepathy grants +4. Once attached, a darkmantle only removes itself if it dies, loses morale, or successfully implants an egg. Half the damage inflicted on a darkmantle is dealt the engulfed creature.
- Psionic occlusion: Darkmantles project a nimbus of psychic noise that makes their presence difficult to comprehend. They surprise on a 4:6 and cannot be targeted by spells or missile attack from a range greater than 30'.
A darkmantle egg is fertilized by the background memories of its host. A day after implantation, incidental or intentional attempts to access deep-seated memories result in nothing more than darkness and nauseating anxiety—the remains of the victim's subconscious has cordoned off the parts of the mind parasitized by a gestating alien psyche. Player characters lose any skills, features, or characteristics related to their background (e.g., a character who used to be a deep sea diver or basket weaver or circus performer is no better at diving or weaving or performing than an average person. No class abilities are lost).
After 3 months of dreamless sleep and forgetting what you were doing the moment you walk into a room, the larval darkmantle hatches from its egg and chews a hole through your mind directly into the Nightmare Dimension, where it matures before making it's way back into the Prime Material Plane by way of the mythic underworld. This is by all accounts a fate worse than a creature physically bursting through your brain, but has the same result: the PC is out of the game.
Because darkmantle eggs are parasitic psychological phenomena and not physical objects, they can only be excised by effects that target the mind. Downtime research will yield three such cases: one of the sorceress Ganavel who cleared the egg from her psyche by converting it into a spell and casting it, another of a nameless
psionic warrior of the Seven War period who neutralized his egg with PSI bombardments, and a third of the ancient poet Eio Ei, who counter-parasitized the nascent darkmantle when he sublimated the alien presence into a lyric poem. He saved himself from the egg, but was slain in the riot that followed the first and only performance of his opus. One copy remains in the Palace Archives—Hearing it while implanted inspires the same integration with the darkmantle that saved the poet, though a listener without such an affliction will be driven insane.
Darkmantle eggs may also be removed through a highly experimental procedure involving accessing the brain via trepanation, treating it with
Oil of Etherealness, and then casting a spell of
Cure Disease. The procedure is practiced by
She of Limpid Mercy and the vicar-surgeons of the Hall of Contrition in exchange for a modest donation, but you have to provide your own oil.
