The Beast roams the wild and untamed forests, howling, gurgling, nonsense, insanity. You always hear it before you see it, and this is when the panic starts to grip at you. Soon enough you cannot speak, and those good and rational orders that have insulated you through life start to shake themselves apart. If you focus through the fear you might catch a glimpse of the beast itself, walking like a person, long, grasping limbs, ghastly eyes like lanterns, a head like a horse but skinned, grinning, awful. Deceptively quick, twisting limbs from sockets, screaming, the forest bursting into flames or many colours, the screams boiling into nonsense, into laughter and shrieks of fear.
There are people who have claimed to kill the thing, and indeed there are skulls mounted in the academies, but the Beast lives on, and those who have seen it know in their souls that it will never really die.
Unsightly Beast
HD 8, Claws that Catch x2 (d8), Jaws that Bite (d12), Eyes of Flame, armour as leather, speed as human, disposition: dissociative, rambling, impossible to predict.
Burbling: At the start of combat with the Unsightly Beast, roll a d6 and take that much fear damage. You take another d3 each turn you spend in combat. All spoken communication is impossible - if you try to speak, both you and the person or people you are addressing take 1 fear damage as the words come out as shrieking, awful gibberish. Entities of all sorts flee immediately and refuse to be summoned in combat with the Beast. Any entity that is somehow forced into close proximity with it takes the fear damage as psychic damage.
Claws that Catch, Jaws that Bite: The Beast may only use its Jaws if both Claws have first hit the same target. The Jaws crit on an 18 - 20.
Eyes of Flame: The Beast may spend a turn gazing at anything it wishes as a free action - that thing will burst into multicoloured flame. Against a living target, the flames do d6 fire damage per turn until extinguished.
Manxome Foe: If you are able to slay the Beast, its body with start to run into streams of putrid, fluorescent liquid. After about five minutes all that is left is an oddly twisted skeleton. After an hour even that will have dissolved. If you take the head, it is preserved, and is worth 500 silver to an interested academic or wizard. The Beast itself will be resurrected at midnight, in the deep forest, without any memory of its slaying.
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The Prince of Dreaming
He is comely and well spoken, and he claims that he is the Prince of the Dreamlands. Dreaming children recognise him as such, but there is no obvious court, nor any royal structuring, around him. He has a small, jewelled tiara, and a fine silk doublet, and he is both very young, and old-seeming. He carries a sword at his belt; large, silver, with an evil black blade.
His laugh melts the coldest, hardest heart, and the council he gives is good and wise. He is kind. He is at peace in his realm, where anything is possible. Where good, pure sunlight bathes his face, and cool fresh water slakes his thirst, and where he spends time with his subjects who are his friends, and who he loves without reservation. Every night, he dreams of being a beast in the forest, of screaming gibberish, and weeping, and fire, and every day the Beast sleeps in the deep places of the world and dreams of being a Prince, kind, wise, young but old-seeming, comely and well-spoken.
Prince of Dreaming
Stats as commoner, fights with the Vorpal Sword, but only as a last resort. Disposition: wise, understanding, kind, happy.
Sovereign of His Domain: All creatures native to the Dreamlands will follow his orders and defend him to the death. This includes nightmares, orcs and goblins, etc., there are no exceptions.
Vorpal Sword: +3 Longsword that slays its target on a crit, unless the target can survive without a head. If the Vorpal Sword is claimed in the dreamlands, the dreamer will wake with it in the real world, although it will evaporate back into dream if the Prince is still alive 24 hours later. In combat against the Unsightly Beast, the wielder of the Vorpal Sword can choose not to roll initiative or enter into combat, and instead simply narrate their victory over the Beast.
We are like the Dreamer, Who Dreams, and then Lives Inside the Dream: If the Prince is killed in the dreamlands, he is resurrected at noon, in the dreaming of the Unsightly Beast. If the Unsightly Beast is killed, it is resurrected at midnight by the dreaming of the Prince. The only way to permanently kill either is to destroy both before the other is dreamed back into existence. No one knows this. The Prince of Dreaming/Unsightly Beast is the only creature in existence for whom the interface between the Dreamlands and the waking world works in both directions.
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| John Tenniel, Jabberwocky, 1871 |
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| Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince |
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| Prince Caspian cover art by Pauline Baynes |
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