Whenever enough new folks join the Dreamland RPG Facebook group or Discord server, I’m going to be posting new Dreamland material (the FB and/or Discord folks get to vote on what it is). In celebration of the Facebook reaching 375 folks, here is a brief post on night-gaunts.
Night-Gaunts
Night-gaunts are human-sized, gargoyle-like creatures with slick black skin, batlike wings, horns and tails. They have no faces, only a blank space where the face should be. They grab lone travelers and carry them through the air, tickling them with their paws and tails, before eventually depositing them in lonely, dangerous places to die.
FGT 2+1D6 SPD 4+1D6 (flying) PER 4+1D6 STB 1D6
- Stealth. Night-gaunts can sneak as if they had Stealth 1D6+2.
- Greater Subtlety. Night-gaunts understand the human body better than humans themselves do and can easily incapacitate humanoids by touching and tickling them. All abhumans and human Dreamlanders have 1/2 FGT against night-gaunts. Dreamers have –4 Fighting against them, unless they are Transformed into beasts.
Rumors about Night-Gaunts
(All Dreamland beasts and monsters have a rumors table, which lists possible truths about that beast in your campaign. By default, pick three of these rumors which are true.)
- Night-gaunts are afraid of flying over water. If you are pursued by one, even crossing a small stream will save you.
- Night-gaunts are related to devils. In hell, they rescue damned souls from their torment, tickle and tease them for a while, and then drop them back into the arms of other devils, the brief respite making the damned even more exquisitely sensitive to pain.
- Contrary to common belief, night-gaunts in fact have large, soulful eyes, like a marmoset or lemur.
- Night-gaunts have false eye-like formations on their bodies, like those on the backs of certain caterpillars. These false eyes can hypnotize and transfix prey.
- Like Peter Pan, night-gaunts can travel physically into the waking world seeking children to take into Dreamland. Though usually returned, these abducted children are never the same afterward, and often become dreamers, poets or madmen.
- Night-gaunts once had faces. All their discarded faces, still alive, lie in a horrible place somewhere in Dreamland.
- Night-gaunts can fly through solid matter. They can also reach inside the human body, performing strange ticklings and perhaps terrible alterations.
- Night-gaunts sometimes do have faces; dreamers with Passion Memories perceive them with the face and gender of people they long for, or care about, or love. Dreamers without Passion Memories (and most Dreamlanders) see them as genderless blanks.
- Night-gaunts are the servants of hoary Nodens, a godlike creature who may be a Great One or a Nightmare. They originate in Nodens’ domain, the Great Abyss, which may be either in the stars or underground. However, they mostly lair in Dreamland’s mountains.
- Night-gaunts are the servants and children of a chthonic mother goddess. They never hurt women or those capable of becoming pregnant.
Drawing Night-Gaunts
As an aside (this won’t appear in the book), I’ve redesigned night-gaunts slightly from how I originally drew them in my Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath comic adaptation a zillion years ago. Initially, I drew them with four limbs — two legs and two batlike wing-arms — because I thought this was more interesting and animalistic. However, lately I’ve become fond of drawing them in a more traditionally gargoyle-ish way, with six limbs — two legs, two arms and two wings. The other form has some advantages as well, but I like giving them a more humanish form, since most of the creatures of Dreamland are less humanoid and tend towards the animal. If they have separate arms, it’s easier to imagine them grabbing people (not that birds of prey can’t grab things with their legs, of course) and I like the eerie echo of humanity. Or maybe both types exist — though, if their body shape is mutable enough to grow two humanoid extra arms, clearly they can also grow other numbers and types of arms as well.
There’s also the question of their tails, which I initially drew a bit like fishhooks, based on the description in “Kadath”. However, in a “Fungi from Yuggoth” poem, Lovecraft describes them more specifically as bearing “the bifid barb of Hell”…in other words, forked tails, like the devil. I’m still on the fence about this one, though.
