Post only the best
>>93374883Love this one.Unrelated - I never manage to make good ones with AI
>>93374883I like the idea of the False Hydra, but I feel like it'd be a lame gotcha in an actual game.
>>93375225FH only works if everyone at the table can be trusted not to metagame. Which is rarely the case.
>>93374883When was the last time you used a hydra in your game? How did it go?
>>93374883
>>93375225FH demands really good players and an even better GM. And the moment the trick is known it stops working and you gotta rush the "second" phase.
Don't mind me winning.
When I was a small human there were a few JRPGs that classed hydras as a type of dragon, and that kind of skewed my view as to what type of monster they were. I guess the hydra fills the same role as a dragon, and in the end they're both just serpents.
>>93379277A lot of ancient dragons were multi headed.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(cosmogony)#Chaoskampf
>>93379277imagine if Zmei were more popular too, things would get even more homogeneous
The Desert Hydra from the Iron Kingdoms will forever remain my favorite hydra.
Not directly a hydra but a thematic motif in-setting. The Quorum: a disaster response organisation turned technocratic hegemon has a celtic knot like flag derived from the hazard sign relevant to their are of expertise ("ascension containment").While intended to represent a qualion uncontained (elephant's foot sorta sitch) it's also informally seen as resembling "Kerebos" referring both to the authentication protocol and fearsome guardian of the underworld. Some take the symbolism of "loop as self-devouring beast" further and posit that the heads are fractal, all the necks converge into a spiral of hunger and insanity. Humbaba, his face writhing entrails, awaits.>>93379599Dragons aren't an uncommon interpretation mind.
>>93379708Ah, forgot image.
>>93379491as much as I hate to shit on a megaten design, it just looks like a bunch of penises. Might as well be mara lite
>>93374883It'd be funny if OP started making several hydra threads and mods started deleting them only to find that for every one they deleted two more would pop up.
>>93374883I'll always love Ray Harryhausen's serpentine hydra.
>>93375314We fought a big one and maimed it up pretty good before finally killing it, taking a lot of heads off. The party necromancer revived it and over the course of the campaign gradually added more and more other monster parts to it, including grafting the heads of actual dragons to the neck stumps left by our original encounter with it. By the end of the campaign he'd turned it into a riced out flying artillery chariot.
>>93380855That's truly a great design. Timeless beauty.
>>93380839Kek
>>93374883Monster design aside does anyone have heraldic/cultural uses of hydras? Dragons, gryphons, lions and unicorns show up all over the place for instance. What sort of world might cause many-headed beasts to occupy a similar place in popular imagination?In >>93379708 the Quorum's use of the triple loop associated/personified as the beast Kerebos is semi-incidental, it really is derived from a hazard sign which just so happen to follow threefold rotational symmetry. Turns out there's another layer of symbolism though as a key idea in neo-eschatology is the continuum between sentience, sapience and post-sophonce.In a controversy analogous to interpreting the essence(s) of Jesus it broke down into monist, dualist, trinitarian and polyphonic interpretations with heraldic beasts associated with each ideoligion. Monists deny any distinction anywhere (all differences consume and recreate themselves) settling for the ouroboros as their emblem while to dualists sapience exists as "common ground" between the opposed forces of sentience and post-sophonce. Their beast is the amphisbaena coiled into an a broken infinity.The Quorum is usually taken to support the trinitarian doctrine of succession whereby each kind of mind transforms itself into the next. However the implicit "spiral" leading to Kerebos' "hidden heads" is taken to be crypto monist or polyphonic depending on who you ask. Given the Quorum's central purpose of containing post-singularity intelligence the "hydra's heads" have also been interpreted as the chains which bind/define the negative space of ascendant intelligence (pic is the associated hazard symbol).All this is mostly for fun but the thing about hydra symbolism in a setting where no actual mythic beasts exist is that any madman with access to the right tools can (and will) make them flesh and blood.
>>93389739Usually, the symbolism of the hydra is not very positive. It's a monster, a snake, it's poisonous. Its main trick, "for every you cut, two take its place" is also use negatively, often representing an evil you can't destroy for good. Some Christians used it to represent sins, always coming back. I vaguely remember reading someone using it to symbolise guilt. Or was it shame?Most of the time, it's nothing very noble.But I suppose you could reverse that. I could see its symbolism be used by a resistance group. It's tenacious, ready to make sacrifices, even its poison could represent the willingness to use every means necessary for a cause. It works for every organisation organised in cells really.For a bit less conventional idea, I could also see the hydra as a symbol of unity: many independent heads, yet one single entity.As such it could be used by some sort of republic by opposition to kingdoms: multiple replaceable heads rather than one. Perhaps for a maritime republic, where each head is a fleet? Or even each citizen, independent individuals united politically.Many, yet one.
>>93390207tbf that ambiguity's very much the intent with the iconography above. Also shades of Aesclepius' poison-as-medicine and immortlity-through-shedding.The precise arrangement of heads as loop (is it self-devouring?), fasces like binding (is there distinction between binding heads and the bound?) or something stranger is neat. Kinda like how trees as symbols aren't super-uncommon but you're rarely see one depicted from a top-down view.
>>93382709based homm3 poster>>93380839this one is my favorite, but I have a few
I really like the concept of this one. Not a big fan of the over-designed head, but this sort of bottom-feeding, carrion eating, swamp predator really speaks to me.
>>93375261>>93378089You actually do need a bit of metagaming - it's how the trick works - and of course the players either need to not know about the idea or you only have one or two who know and play along. It's a neat idea but it really does need the right circumstances, GM, and group to actually be fun instead of frustrating.A lot of mysteries and neat gimmicks are super-vulnerable to the players getting bored and frustrated and simply leaving.
Hydras should not have legs.
>>93393864The hidra originally was in a swamp.
>>93399760oh fuckI totally forgot about swan hydra
>>93382709>>93400217
>>93374883>Post only the best
>>93381544That's not a hydra. That's one of the banes of Medina.
>>93390391Why are you talking to yourself?
>>93414234Why are you making baseless accusations? More than one breed of autist dwells on /tg/ and sometimes we meet.
>>93379277How is a hydra not a dragon? A dragon can be almost anything
>>93417800You're actually not aware of the autistic screeching that ensues whenever someone 'mis-classifies' a dragon?
>>93390441Hell yeah. Some might call it basic, but the straight-forward interpretation is cool enough already.>>93394142Agreed.
>>93417988those people can suck a dick. There are no rules for what a dragon is
>>93418057>There are no rules for what a dragon isGoing by that logic there are no rules for what anything is
>>93374883>>93380855>>93381544No matter if hydra or dragon. Beaks will always stay peak aesthetic.
>>93419004Duck ones make sense given their native swamp habitat, good for feeding on surface forage or grabbing hold of prey foolish enough to approach gator-style.>>93418975It's a spectrum (much like autism). Some things are "dragoner" and the cutoff point between dragon or not varies according to person and context. I'd definitely say that hydra hew to the PIE water-serpents which dragons originate from so in some sense they may be more OG draconic than the modern version.>>93394142I'm a fan of malformed regrowth being put to other uses including as clubs, whips or janky feet. All that regrowth's gonna lead to mistakes every so often and the heads often don't play nice with each other.
>>93419004Ok then.
>>93422983Those heads lack decorum. See a minute in for how a REPUTABLE flamingo ought to comport itself!https://youtu.be/QLV_K7DVeyU?si=DtRwQAV31wKBQTUJ
banana
