Panda's Drawing Room

Beyond the classic triumvirate of vampirism, lycanthropy, and zombification (which the esteemed vampire hunter Marienne du Sang rather amusingly termed "The Big Three" shortly before becoming a vampire herself), there are numerous other transformative conditions that can affect monster hunters:

The Hollow Curse: Contracted from slaying too many void wraiths. Your insides slowly become an empty space that hungers for reality itself. The final stages involve your skin becoming a thin membrane barely containing an infinite darkness. The only known cure involves filling yourself with sanctified lead, which is exactly as pleasant as it sounds.

Gargoylification: Not actually from gargoyles (who are quite pleasant once you get to know them), but from the parasitic stone-spirits that sometimes inhabit them. Turns your flesh to living stone over the course of months. The Brotherhood of the Hammer actually seeks this out deliberately - they claim it makes them better hunters.

The Hive-Mind Plague: Spread by the psychic residue left in the corpses of hiveminds. Slowly connects you to every other infected person until you lose your individual identity. The worst part? You remain conscious the entire time, just… shared. The Collective of St. Sebastian contains over 300 former monster hunters, all sharing the same thoughts.

The Butcher's Mark: This one's nasty. Kill enough things that bleed, and their blood starts to recognize you. You become a focal point for blood itself. It seeks you out, tries to drown you. The famous hunter Klaus von Rothstein ended up floating in a sphere of every drop of blood within a mile radius. He's still technically alive in there, they say.

A few practical tips from the Hunter's Black Book (written anonymously by someone who was clearly turning into something awful):

Never hunt the same type of monster more than three times in a row. They start to recognize you on a metaphysical level. Carry blessed silver AND cursed iron. Sometimes you need to fight corruption with corruption. If your reflection starts giving you hunting advice, STOP IMMEDIATELY. The Rite of St. Mercurius can temporarily halt most transformations, but each use cuts your remaining lifespan in half. If you find yourself understanding monster languages without having learned them, it's already too late.

There's also the philosophical question posed by the scholar-hunter Yavina the Bright: "If we accept that all monsters were once something else, then perhaps becoming a monster is simply the universe's way of maintaining equilibrium." She wrote this shortly before her transformation into living stained glass, which honestly just strengthens her point.

The Monastery of the Eternal Vigil actually maintains a special wing for transformed hunters, treating them as honored guests rather than monsters. Their philosophy is that someone who gave their humanity in service of protecting others deserves respect, not silver bullets. Of course, they also keep them in cells lined with every ward known to man, but it's the thought that counts.

Remember: if you start experiencing symptoms of transformation, don't panic. Panic accelerates most transformative conditions. Instead, calmly make your way to the nearest temple of St. Ophelia the Unchanging, or if that's not possible, find the deepest hole you can and jump in. Sometimes the old solutions are the best solutions.

new drop - Mounts of Mayhem

new mob - Nautilus

spawns underwater

tameable, can be ridden with saddles

fed pufferfish

can be bred

zombie nautilus spawn with drowneds

when riding will give you an effect - breath of the nautilus - that pauses your oxygen bar when riding the nautilus

if you look up you can jump out the water

there is nautilus armour

new weapon - spears

two attack modes:

charge (more speed= more damage)

dash (less damage but higher knockback and can force dismounts) - lower the spear for this

higher tiers are heavier - cant be held as long (i think for dash?) and it will lower and do only damage then rise again

you can joust

zombie horses now naturally spawn

spawn with zombies riding them with spears

This woman joined the BBC in 1960 and was so good at sound editing for classical music that she could literally see where the trombones were on a vinyl record. Like she’d just look at the grooves and be like, “There they are.” People thought she was doing actual magic. She basically said, “Yeah, I am,” and walked into the BBC Radiophonic Workshop like it was her birthright.

She didn’t wait to be assigned to the Workshop like everyone else. She just said, “I want this,” and got it. By 1962 she was creating entire soundscapes and electronic music for hundreds of BBC radio and television productions.

Then in 1963 she casually created the Doctor Who theme—one of the first pieces of music ever made entirely with electronics. It completely changed the landscape of TV sound design. She took Ron Grainer’s notes and turned them into something nobody had ever heard before using tape loops and pure experimentalism. When he listened to it, he literally said, “Did I write this?” And she, ICONICALLY, replied, “Most of it.”

He wanted to credit her. The BBC said no.

She was a woman in a deeply male-dominated space. And not just “wow, there aren’t many women here,” but like explicitly—officially—“women don’t get creative credit here.” Engineering was seen as men’s work. Sound design was men’s work. Women were allowed to assist, to type memos, to splice tape if a man told them where. But they weren’t allowed to author. They weren’t allowed to be the genius in the room.

So they handed all the glory to Ron Grainer.

She wasn’t paid royalties. She didn’t get a credit. She didn’t even get her name on-screen. Not for fifty. actual. years.

Delia also composed music for other BBC programmes, including the Blue Veils and Golden Sands, The Doctor Who story Inferno even reused some of her music that had originally been made for other productions—because that’s how good her work was. It got recycled because nothing else came close.

She hated the remixes of the theme they did after 1980 because they kept sanding down the weirdness, the dissonance, the edge—everything she had fought to put into it. 

So yeah. Delia Derbyshire is my Roman Empire. Every time I hear the Doctor Who theme, I think about her physically slicing tape by hand and looping it to build something no one had ever heard before—and I just sit there like: 🫡🫡🫡🫡🫡

For bonus material, Cosey Fanni Tutti (who worked on the soundtrack for the film) also has a book that explores Delia's life and work alongside her own and that of fifteenth-century mystic Margery Kempe, because why settle for one pioneering woman when you can have three!

Drinking horn with gilded copper mounts, Europe, 15th century