Earlier this week, Wizards Of The Coast published its latest Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook, the monster-filled Mordenkainen’s Tome Of Foes. As is standard with a new D&D manual of monsters, it’s full of all sorts of new creatures, ranging from hideously dangerous to relatively benign. One of its most unsettling new additions to the tabletop institution’s vile lore, though, has an especially interesting origin: It was conceived by a Make-A-Wish recipient who visited the design team’s offices some time back.
Specifically—and per D&D Beyond—young Nolan Whale, a participant in the program (which arranges interesting and fun experiences for kids with life-threatening illnesses) used his wish to request to spend a day at Wizards, consulting with the team on all sorts of aspects of the game’s creations and workings. But Nolan wasn’t just a passive observer, watching the dice roll; he also managed to come up with a creature concept that’s legitimately pretty fucked up: A memory-stealing, body-duplicating slime creature known as the Oblex. A product of the villainous Mind Flayers—the psychic, racist, asshole, slaving tentacle-faced dickheads of the D&D world—the creature can eat you, devour your memories, and then spit out a perfect copy connected to its mass by an “umbilical cord of ooze behind them.”
It’s both super-gross and wonderfully paranoia-inducing—”Why won’t that pleasant tavern keeper turn around so you can see if he’s actually got a slime tether, huh?!”—and we have to hope that whoever Nolan’s DM is, they’ve granted him a billion inspiration points for bringing a little more screwed-up sci-fi weirdness to the D&D world.