Righteous Clay

Yes, that is totally a Flumph PC.

A few early issues of Dragon magazine featured a special insert called the "Creature Catalog" (which is different from a  later hard-backed book, also called the Creature Catalog, which was an early version of AD&D's Monstrous Manual). Most of the creatures from these inserts have vanished from the game, though a few such as the Hamadryad, the Burbur and the Orpsu have made a few random obscure appearances in later editions.

Creature Catalog III from Dragon #101 features a monster called a Righteous Clay, created by Howard Granok and originally illustrated by Marsha Kauth.  A Righteous Clay is, at its name implies, a sentient lump of gray clay that skulks around caverns waiting to suck the souls out of anyone who wanders across it.

Wait, what?

Yeah, that's right.  It's an evil ball of clay that devours souls using an ability named, appropriately enough, Soul Gouge.

 So what exactly is a "soul" in terms of D&D? In later games, particularly the Planescape setting-- which allows your characters to explore the various Heavens, Hells, Astral, Ethereal and Elemental Planes-- the soul is your personality and "essence" which passes on to another plane of existence that fits with your alignment (i.e. you go to whatever Heaven your culture believes in if you're good, or your particular brand of Hell if you're evil).  It's what makes you you.

Thus, when the righteous clay steals your soul, your body is left an empty husk.  Not a dead.  Just empty.  You breathe and sleep. You move if someone pushes you. You eat if someone puts food in your mouth. But there's nothing inside you anymore.

And what does the clay do with your soul, exactly? It... gains a few hit points.  Your soul is food. That's it.  It uses the very essence of a sentient being the same way you'd use a cheese sandwich.

And what's even worse is, according to the text: "righteous clays are so named because of their extreme arrogance and self-centeredness."  It KNOWS what it's doing to you and your loved ones.  It's just too self-absorbed and snooty to give a crap.  It's not even like the clay has a vastly alien mentality and just can't conceive of its prey as a sentient being.  It can understand Common and can actually converse by vibrating its body, " in the manner of a stereo speaker" to quote the text.  They don't care about the pain and loss they're inflicting. They're just hungry, dammit.

It is possible to recover the souls a righteous clay has stolen if the beast is killed, then a Reincarnation, Remove Curse, Restoration, Resurrection or Wish spell is cast on the empty body the soul was taken from. So some of the horror is blunted. Especially in a high magic world like, say, the Forgotten Realms, where you can pop down to Main Street and pay a mage to give you a spell scroll.  

But what if the Clay escapes and vanishes into the miles of black caverns that it inhabits?  Or what if you're a poor farmer who can't afford magic? Or a goblin or kobold whose beneath the notice of other beings (hey, goblins and kobolds have loved ones too!). Then your soul, or the soul of a close friend or loved one, is gone forever.

I'm actually surprised this monster never made a return appearance anywhere.  It's absolutely terrifying.

Even though righteous clays seem a lot like oozes, slimes and puddings, I like to think they're a completely separate creature entirely. To me, the various ooze-monsters are giant monstrous slime molds like myxomycetes, dictyostelids, labyrinthulomycota, or some other sort of protist/fungi. Righteous clays, on the other hand, are literally sentient clay-- a soil material formed from extremely fine particles of feldspar (minerals containing aluminum and silica) with small traces of oxidized metals and organic matter. Though "alive", they don't have any cellular structures.

In our world, some scientists theorize that the development of life may have been aided by clays because they can attract and protect organic molecules and facilitate polymerization (the development of long chains of carbon-based molecules like carbohydrates and fats).  Maybe in a fantasy world, some of this early "life" remained within the clay, giving it a bizarre animation of its own.

Relating to this idea, many Earth mythologies describe a god creating human beings out of clay.  Maybe righteous clays are scraps from that original sculpting process.  Or perhaps rejected prototypes that have retained some of the living essence that the gods originally imbued into the soil.  

Yet their form of "life" is imperfect.  They constantly crave that which the gods gave their more fortunate relatives-- an eternal soul.  But the clays are only partially developed, and thus lack the ability to retain the souls they steal.  Instead, they metabolize them to power their own torturous existence, quickly destroying that which they hunger for most. Perhaps their arrogance and selfishness comes from envy of the god's more perfect creations. A defense mechanism to avoid facing what they are. 

Oh, also,  elves and half-orcs can be affected by the Soul Gouge power, even though, to quote the text "(they) do not possess a soul per se". That just raises so many questions.  Why didn't early D&D elves and half-orcs (and presumably orcs) have souls?  Where did they go when they died? What was animating their bodies and giving them personalities?  And, if they don't have souls, what is the righteous clay feeding on when it attacks them?

You confuse me sometimes, Old School D&D. 

Wyrmlet

A "head" wyrmlet with two drones

As I mentioned in my first post, before it became exclusively Warhammer and 40K, the British magazine White Dwarf used to be a general gaming magazine featuring articles about D&D, Traveller, Middle-Earth, Warhammer and many others. A regular feature was the Fiend Factory, which showcased reader-created monsters.  Some of the classic monsters of D&D, including drow, githzerai and githyanki, began in these pages (though they really didn't become famous until they were compiled into the original Fiend Folio.  More on that in a later post).

Sadly, there were also many, many delightful oddballs that vanished into obscurity-- frequently without seeing any other attention beyond the few blurbs in White Dwarf.

One of my personal favorites is the Wyrmlet from WD #32, created by Peter Ryding.

A wyrmlet looks like a 3 inch tall, fleshy coin with segmented legs and arms.  The two "faces" of most wyrmlets are featureless except for a small, beaked mouth on one side and a circle of tiny suckers around the edges.  Wyrmlets use these suckers to link together, forming a longer, serpentine structure/creature called a "wyrmling".  A rare, elite class of wyrmlet with more complex facial features will form the head of this colonial organisms, though the head is not strictly necessary once the whole colony has linked up. While linked, each wyrmlet can vibrate its cartilaginous beak, the cumulative effect of which is a freaking disintegration ray if focused by the head! Though,  due to its frequency,  this ray only destroys metals.

One unfortunate problem with the Fiend Factory articles is that they rarely provide any ecological or behavioral information about the monsters-- partially, I'd imagine, because this was back when most RPGs were all about hack-and-slash dungeon crawling and number-crunching.  So there's no explanation as to why wyrmlets link up like this. 

This does, however, leave them a blank slate for me to fill in my own ideas. The wyrmlet's colonial habits, for instance, remind me of siphonophores-- close relatives of jellyfish that are actually formed from multiple, specialized jelly-creatures all linked together by a common digestive-system.  Well-known siphonophores include the Portuguese Man-O-War and the By-the-Wind Sailor.

 I'd imagine the individual wyrmlets are also similarly specialized.  The text even hints at this a little, with reference to the more complex "head" individuals, along with wyrmlets that are "mages" and "clerics".  Each wyrmlet is probably a highly-simplified being, specialized for fighting, digesting, waste filtering, sensory awareness, etc.  So specialized, in fact, that they cannot function on their own and must link up into the colonial wyrmling to form a full metabolism. 

"Sensory" and "Stomach" wyrmlets

Wyrmlet colonies subsist primarily on metals-- specifically particulate, oxidized metals.  Specialized sensory wyrmlets can detect faint traces of iron, copper and other minerals in soil and stone, which the wyrmling extracts using its disintegration ray. They will, of course,  eagerly attack sources of pure metal-- such as armor or weapons-- to obtain metals in a concentrated, purified form.

Wyrmlets live in complex, ant-like tunnels beneath temperate forests, slowly extracting metals from the soil.  This metal extraction alters the floral composition of the forest above, encouraging the growth of plants that can tolerate reduced soil metals.  Wyrmlet droppings-- which are almost entirely oxidized metals-- are fed upon by particular strains of bacteria which can eventually form large, slimy colonies on the surface that resemble Nostoc or "Witch's Butter".  Ecologists, foresters and rangers can detect the presence of wyrmlets based on this altered ecosystem. 

Wyrmlet art copied from a "newspaper rock" found in their territory.

Wyrmlets are not intelligent enough to create complex societies, though they are do know how to wield discarded weapons from pixies, fairies, brownies and other tiny forest dwellers.  They will even produce the occasional artwork on hard surfaces such as stone or wood.  The subjects of these works are usually ants, springtails, worms, moles, tardigrades and other subterranean organisms that they regularly encounter, but there are hints that the wyrmlets have a rudimentary concept of a "god" or at least invisible spirits who provide the metals they consume.