An Alternate Ecology of Slaadi, part 2.

First make sure you've read part 1.

The slaadi, as we have established, are expressions of ultimate Khaos, born of the interaction of the Far Realm with what mortals know as reality, infused into the Chaos of Limbo and spawned in their multitudes.

But there's a big question. Why are all the slaadi, expressions of Khaos that they are . . . all so much alike? Why do they all look like frogs? We covered the association of frogs and serpents with chaos in ancient cultures, but surely that can't be all there is?

Well, the simplest answer is, it isn't. There are countless forms of slaadi. The problem is, we don't recognize them as slaadi because they are so very different, many of them unique, or almost so.

So...what else lives in Limbo that might actually be Slaadi? Or in nearby Pandemonium?

In canon so far, I can find very little. Howlers, perhaps, native to Pandemonium. Chaos Beasts, definitely. Chaos dragons?

So maybe we need to search farther afield, to aberrations heretofore thought to be unrelated. Limbo's infinite chaos, touched by the Khaos of the Outer Dark, could produce anything, but most such things would be aberrations, and many would be shifting and chaotic. So. Here's some interesting possibilities.

Balhannoths. Tentacled, reality warping things often found in the Shadowfell and the Underdark, they certainly suit the theme.

Chokers. Little boneless things with limbs both like and unlike tentacles, one can imagine a froglike cast to them with little effort.

Flumphs. Yes, flumphs. Rarely produced, these Lawful Good flying jellyfish are spawned as slaadi, but immediately flee to less Khaotic climes.

Morkoth. No one knows where these hideous amalgams of squid, human, lobsters, and fish came from, but like many aberrations they have powerful psychic abilities. Easy enough to make them children of Limbo, different forms for the ever shifting slaadi.

Gibbering mouthers, shoggoth, etc. These fluid, impossible things are chaos and madness embodied, so they could easily be slaadi.

These are just the beginning, of course. There must be slaadi of all the other colors, not merely red, blue, green, black, grey, death...Where are yellow, purple, mauve, pink, etc? And are they frog like? Where are the snake chaos things we talked about?

Well.

Yuan-ti are listed as monstrosities...but some of them stray very far indeed from reasonable biologies. What if the material plane Yuan-ti, as we know them, are but descendants of the snake-like slaadi? And things like the yuan-ti anathema are closer than the others to their origins?

As a mythological aside, we established that in the Egyptian mythos, there were 8 beings of primeval Khaos, the Ogdoad. 4 had the heads of frogs (and were male), 4 had the heads of snakes, and were female.

Let's play with that a little. There are, of course, countless slaad lords. But the most famous are Bazim-Gorag, Ssendam, and Ygorl. Bazim and Ygorl are definitely male, definitely frog-headed. Ssendam appears female often. So let's shift things just a little, and say her golden slaad form is snake headed. Snakelike chaos gods of note include Apep, said to predate creation as well. Maybe Apep is another form of one of the Ogdoad, and also a slaad lord. And since snake, in this schema, actually female. A known female slaad lord is Urae-Naas, appearing as a morbidly obese slaad who can only crawl...on her belly...like a snake. She's a mother deity, implied to be always pregnant with countless children. So let's keep her. Also representing uncounted numbers, we have Norsar the many, a powerful white slaad who can reach through time and duplicate himself. The slaad lord Renbuu is the lord of color, and changes reality by changing how it looks. He can represent one aspect of going unseen. So the other must be true invisibility. What chaos god is invisible? Or...perhaps kills you to behold her? Perhaps we could use Renenunet, whose gaze could kill. And we merge her with the Gorgons, so that one of her forms is a medusa. Her name even has the same elements as Amunet, one of the Ogdoad that has inspired us.

So we might have these pairs

Apep darkness shadow light Bazim-Gorag

Ssendam creation formless destruction Ygorl

Renenunet killing gaze unseen illusion Renbuu

Urae-Naas birth numberless duplication Norsar

All our critters on the left are 'female', on the right are 'male' insofar as they are gendered at all (in this alternate schema), and the left hand critters could also be the true forms (if such a phrase has meaning) of the many snakelike yuan-ti gods. Anyway, we'll act like all this is true, and add plenty of snake slaadi to match our frog slaadi, and quite a few more chaotic ones as well, when we finally get to the Alternate Ecology of the Slaadi supplement:

The Winds of Limbo.