DDE: Iounian

Artwork by Jason Sholtis

Since my Christmas post sharing a monster from the abandoned Dwimmermount Designer's Edition was so well received, I thought I'd offer you another one today, especially after having posted about the Four Worlds over at Grognardia Games Direct yesterday. As with my earlier post, I'm also providing some commentary on their origins, since that's something I feel distinguishes this project from the 2014 published version.

Iounian (Moon Men)

AC 6 [13], HD 6* (27hp), Att 4 × arm (1d4 or by weapon), 1 × bite (1d6), THAC0 14 [+5], MV 180' (60'), SV D10 W11 P12 B13 S14, ML 10, AL Neutral, XP 500, NA 2d6 (2d12), TT L

Born beneath the cold, airless glare of Telluria’s lone moon, the Iounians are the insectoid natives of that desolate sphere, creatures more often whispered of than seen. In form they resemble a nightmarish fusion of ant and praying mantis: tall, angular humanoids with six jointed limbs, four deft enough for tools and weapons, the remaining pair built for swift, skittering motion. Their heads bear great faceted eyes that glint like black glass, twitching antennae forever tasting the unseen air, and cruel mandibles made to rend flesh.

The Iounians dwell far below the moon’s scarred surface, in lightless warrens honeycombed through the stone. There they gather in vast hives, some holding dozens, others hundreds of their kind. In ages past they were far more numerous, but time and unknown calamities have thinned their swarms. Those who remain are wary to the point of violence. Strangers are assumed to be enemies and most encounters end in sudden, lethal assault unless the intruders can swiftly give cause for restraint. Yet this savagery should not be mistaken for mindlessness. The Iounians are keen of intellect and, when approached with care and purpose, capable of reasoned negotiation.

Gifted with senses attuned to darkness, as well as an innate extrasensory awareness. In battle they are terrifyingly swift. Their powerful legs can hurl them 20' straight up or 40' forward in a single bound and, when they leap upon a foe in this way, the force of their momentum lends them a +1 bonus to attacks made immediately thereafter. They fight with a flurry of clawed limbs and snapping mandibles, either rending with claws and bite alone or wielding up to four weapons at once, all while their jaws seek blood.

• Infavision: 90'

• ESP: At will, as the spell

Commentary

As a child of the 1970s, to say I was obsessed with space exploration, specifically lunar exploration, is something of an understatement. Like all my peers, I wanted to be an astronaut someday and spent an inordinate amount of time learning about the Moon and early attempts to reach it from Earth. This obsession probably played a big part in my eventually becoming a science fiction fan, too — an interest I maintain to this day.

Consequently, when I started imagining what became the Dwimmermount campaign, I always had the notion in the back of my mind that it would include "interplanetary" travel in one fashion or another. I don't mean planar travel in the usual D&D sense, though I wasn't opposed to that either. However, at the time I started work on Dwimmermount, I had immersed myself in early 20th century fantasy — "pulp fantasy," as I called it — and many of those foundational authors and stories included visits to other worlds, like the Moon, Mars, and Venus.

So, when the time came to imagine what the Moon looked like in Telluria (the setting of Dwimmermount), I drew heavily on those early science fiction works, like H.G. Wells's 1901 novel, The First Men in the Moon and the 1902 French movie, Le Voyage dans la Lune.

Both of these works included insectoid lunar inhabitants. Their influence was so great on subsequent fiction that many later writers followed suit. Consequently, the idea of insect-men on the Moon seemed so obvious that I gleefully adopted it into my conception of Telluria's moon, which I called Ioun, after the magic stones found in Dungeons & Dragons (themselves borrowed, with permission, from Jack Vance's "Morreion," later integrated into Rhialto the Marvellous).

D&D played another role in the creation of the Iounians, because the game already included its own insectoid species, though they weren't from space: the thri-kreen. The thri-kreen were introduced into AD&D through the Monster Cards published in 1982 by TSR. Created by Paul Reiche III, they were inspired by the phraint, a similar monster found in Arduin (a game for which Reiche's friend, Erol Otus, had provided some of his earliest artwork). Though I was never a huge fan of the thri-kreen, I was aware of them and I have little doubt they subconsciously influenced my image of the Iounians, along with the other sources I've already mentioned.