#false hydra

Okay so:

Mike not being able to tell El he loves her even when dying? What if it has to do with the memory stuff happening (the theories about the mind flayer, vecna, the false hydra)

Mike was only ever able to tell El he loved her ONCE and that was when Will was there. If they are currently in the dreamlike state we think they are in/being stuck in vecna’s curse where old memories are being used to fill in the blanks, then that’s an explanation for why he wasn’t able to say it back, Will wasn’t there; and he was never able to say it without him.

Not to mention the sirens were going off so it couldn’t have happened—El couldn’t have used her powers. El also didn’t have the tank so she couldn’t bring him into the void with her regardless.

Mike being the only one to notice the sound from the speakers; Mike being the only one to notice the disruption.

Mike being connected to Vecna by the mind flayer in a poster that came out POST finale.

Mindy Flare’s (Mind Flayer’s) words saying on the wsqk radio: “You’re not listening alone, you never were. Every voice, every song, every moment on this frequency traveled outward. Spreading. Connecting. Becoming something larger. We really took over this town didn’t we.”

Mindy Flare saying: “I’ve been your queen at the controls, and Hawkins you never know; I might just be back one day. Oh! Vance, make sure you close the gate on the way out of the station. You are so bad always leaving it open.

We never saw the gate close. We the audience never saw it happen. It just disappeared, leaving no trace not like we’ve seen previously.

The false hydra grows from LIES. Friends don’t lie but that’s not true is it? Will never told Mike his feelings, lying by omission. Jonathan and Nancy lying to each other about how they felt. Mike lying to El in season three. So many lies in this series and there are probably more but all of this is coming from memory soooo.

And to bring it back: “players must notice subtle inconsistencies to realize the town is being consumed by something no one remembers.” Mike noticing the sound.

The false hydra GROWS. The heartbeat in the finale before the time-skip.

The false hydra is filling in blanks with past memories: Mike with the vampire teeth, Will getting the ick? Seems familiar to Bob and Joyce in season 2.

Mike, Nancy, and Will all looking just like their parents.

Hopper wearing his season one outfit, when he should still be assumed to be dead by the town?

Another from the radio broadcast on the WSQK: “So when WSQK disappears, don’t be afraid of the quiet. Sit with it. Listen to it. It knows you better than you think. *clock chimes start*. The clock is counting down to ELEVEN.”

It feels like they’re telling us to sit with the ending, to think about it. I could be so very wrong but that’s what I’m interpreting from it.

I feel like the false hydra is an excellent example of a monster that doesn't belong in D&D. Which in some ways, is the point. It turns the game into an exercise in paranoia and the unreliability on memory and perception. It's very much a monster of its era, by which I mean it plays into paranoia about the unreliability of memory and perception in a way that a lot of 2010s monsters do (see It Follows or the Steven Moffet era of Doctor Who).

The false hydra's powers affect an enormous radius (five miles) and do not allow for a saving throw. And, since it erases the memories of the existence of its victims, using one of them inherently relies on players being able to balance metagame and in-character knowledge. I've been running games for more than a quarter century at this point, and I don't think many of my groups would be more engaged than frustrated with being told that they can't remember something or someone who was previously important to them, or that many of them would be able to not metagame about their missing memories.

All of this strikes me as being kind of unfair: although OD&D was grimier and characters were more disposable (and I think it's not surprising that the false hydra originates in an OSR blog), D&D has evolved into a game of heroic power fantasy, and the false hydra is all about stripping agency away from the characters. The original article talks a lot about how the disappearing people and lost memories in a community plagued by a false hydra would lead to realistic mental collapse, which is horrific and sad and not how things work in a game where brain damage can be fixed with a good night's sleep.

Which is why I think the false hydra doesn't belong in D&D. It's an awesome monster, don't get me wrong. The idea of a whole community's minds fraying under the stress of a collapsing reality before being enslaved by a fleshy multi-headed horror is a genuinely scary and cool plot. It would be perfect as the antagonist of a horror novel, a horror game like Dread or Call of Cthulhu, or even a dark fantasy game where characters are less powerful and more disposable, like an OSR game or Mork Borg. I think it works best in its original context: as a scary story that loosely fits into a D&D world. But a straight conversion to D&D 5e or Pathfinder feels like it would mess with the social contract between players and GMs in that game.

TL:DR, no, I have no intention of making my own version of it.

For the unfamiliar: A False Hydra is a monster with a very particular gimmick, namely that it makes itself, and its victims, be forgotten using an enchanting song.. It's essentially 'The DM gets to gaslight the players a bit, as a treat' the monster.

Usually, the setup is the players arrive in a town where things seem peaceful, if quiet, and steadily realize that people that should, by all rights exist, simply aren't there. The innkeeper has a child, but claims she doesn't even know the man in the family portrait. If you press the matter she gets upset. You eat fresh baked bread for dinner, but in the morning, there has simply 'never been' a baker. That kind of thing.

And of course, the classic of 'You wake up. There's an extra bedroll. you don't know why, but the fact that it's empty fills you with dread.'

But of course, implying you had another party member who just got eaten and forgotten kinda fucks over the story you've been telling this whole time. Shouldn't all those fights have gone differently? How are the players going to care about a character who literally exists only as a supposed hole in their memories?

That's why, for this to work, I recommend new players (or just act like you're running a slightly laxer table).

Essentially, figure out what basic utilitarian weaknesses the party has, and then, without any great fanfare, handwave them. Suppose they don't have a wizard. They find a magic item. You say, 'yeah, you get it identified, and it's a ...' Without particularly specifying how or with whom. They're in a dark cave, and the one human of the group is like 'hey, can I even see?' and you tell them, 'oh, yeah, don't worry about it, just pretend you had Darkvision cast on you.'

If they press the issue, you make up a joke, not-actually-real character, who you say is actually doing all this stuff. Blinzki the Narratively Convenient Wizard or whatever. Just a narrative construct, there to grease the wheels of gameplay. (Though, keep score a bit. Remember where things by all rights shouldn't have worked)

And then, they'll get to this town, and you'll feed them a potentially magical item, and they'll ask what it does, and if you're very, very lucky, you'll get an exchange to the tune of

'Do you know anybody who could identify it?'

'We've always been able to identify things before.'

'Yeah. You think about that, and shiver with a sense of wrongness.'

You find the corpse of a wizard. Her journal references people with your names, and she talks about how lucky she's felt to be traveling with you. She's not a great combatant, usually hiding when battle starts, but she's made herself useful with in other ways, casting darkvision on the fighter when they're in a dark cave, and enhancing abilities at opportune moments.

You don't know her.

Inspired by a random post i saw.

(This feels more lore accurate than I care to admit...)

A False Hydra is a monster that it makes itself, and its victims, be forgotten using an enchanting song.

quick horror doodle to get it out of my head :]

So I don't know shit about Dnd but I wanted to read something about false hydras and uh, I found this reddit post here:

First off, the false hydra fits conformitygate really well. If conformitygate is real, what the DB are doing right now is exactly what the false hydra does: - Memory manipulation (Mike = Tammy, Mike = the only one who understood El, Jancy breakup, Dustin and the girl from S2) - Gaslighting (Demo fatigue, "We didn't even want to write!", documentary, everyone satisfied with the ending) - People disappearing (Suzie, Vickie) - Personality changes (Steve & Jonathan all season, Mike the not so Brave, Joyce's overall weird behaviour, El turning suicidal, Hopper being cool with El's suicide) - only reveals itself through minute details (dial colour change, watzit boardgames, leaves changing colour) There are also plenty of conformitygate posts elaborating on the false Hydra I've seen on tumblr from people who actually know this stuff (I could only find this but there's definitely more!)

But regardless of these already uncanny similarities, I find it crazy that I stumble upon a Reddit post from January 4 that talks about the fallacies of using the false Hydra in DnD games and it fits exactly what's happening rn with ST5: (these are quotes from the post):

"if you aren't a good storyteller the narrative will quickly fall apart and play like shit" (self-explanatory)

"False Hydra rely on metagame knowledge and continuity to even be scary at all" (that's us, it's scary for us because we're figuiring it out and going crazy; it's not scary for the GA)

"Just like a False Hydra sings you into a fake interpretation of reality, I think D&D is overloaded with false representations of what D&D actually is" (the show being far more popular than it should have been, GA members making out a huge proportion of the fandom and frankly not getting the point of the show)

=> Furthermore the thing about using the False Hydra is that you can only do it once: Everyone who's run into the False Hydra once will never be surprised by it again - and will afterwards suspect it with everything that's off ==> which means they had to wait for S5 to pull it off. Now, the thessalhydra is NOT the false Hydra. The false hydra was first mentioned in 2014 but let's be real for a second: If you wanted to do this thing and wanted to foreshadow it, you'd use something with a similar name. And let's just assume that the false hydra is a variant of the thessalhydra: That would mean that the DB teased the show's ending in S1E8 already: THE ENDING THEY ALWAYS WANTED, THAT THEY KNEW FROM THE START: It ends with the Thessalhydra. It starts with the demagorgon and ends with the Thessalhydra.

Btw., in the S1 episode finale, the thessalhydra is defeated by Will ("The Show has always been about Will, it is going to end with Will" "Full Circle" back to Season 1).

And one more thing: The painting. Let's not forget they officially reminded us of the painting in the S5 promo. We got the funko pop. We got the "it will pay-off". We got the whole thing about this being the first case of the Cyrano trope not working out.

And what's on the painting? A dragon, sure. I mean, they couldn't completely give it away, could they? The DB said they thought about what to put on the painting for a very long time. In the end, they fight a multi-headed monster: Mike the heart, Will casting a spell, and Lucas looking like a knight (Idk what Dustin's doing).

I feel like I cooked but I probably just reheated some nachos : D