Dragon penis / Shambling mound
Ron Edwards:
Hiya,
Back in 2002, someone started an RPG.net thread called "Do dragons have penises?" Much like Superman responding to a cry for help, I swooped to contribute. The thread also led to a second part by me concerning the shambling mound.
I've pulled out my posts for posterity at The latest at the Adept site. The original thread is entertaining as a whole too, and you can check it out through the embedded link if you want.
If anyone wants to pursue the topics here, we can. Seems like it might be fun.
Best, Ron
Ben Lehman:
So, in your opinion, what the heck is up with the gas spore? I mean, I know that predators will sometimes imitate their prey, but with a gas spore we've got a freaking mushroom imitating a sentient apex predator. What the heck?
yrs--
--Ben
Ron Edwards:
Hi Ben!
I think I got this one.
1. Perhaps the best model for the dungeon environment is the very deep ocean, in which the critters living there eat, not so much one another, but whatever drifts downward too far consistently enough. In this model, nearly every species is an "apex predator." This is a minor point at the moment, but stay with me.
2. If you're a creature that a Beholder wants to eat, you are very fucked unless ...
i) You have a hell of a ranged attack, but then again, the Beholder is mighty clever and knows your habits and capacities better than you do, so you're probably still fucked
ii) You breed so copiously that getting eaten doesn't affect your reproductive success much, also known as the "r" life-history strategy; but then again, if you're big enough to be viable Beholder prey, then this isn't an option, so you're probably still fucked
... and then there's the rest of us, without ranged weaponry worth playing chicken with a death-ray with, and without the ability to spawn 100,000 offspring. OK, so my point is, faced with a Beholder, you have a single viable tactic: run up and hit it as hard as you can. Behavioral ecologists call selection for this kind of behavior "the best of a bad job," meaning it works only well enough to be selectively favored over all the other options, i.e., they don't work at all.
3. Spores are reproductive cells, the equivalent of sperm/ova in animals and pollen/sperm in many plants. However, they are not restricted to fungi; there are lots of ancestral-type plants whose gametes are best described as spores. No one uses the term spores for animals or animal-related protists, but in theory and in practice equivalents may be found. Also, it's a very common thing to see sacs of spores sent out to fall upon whatever they may, and explosive or at least highly-dispersive packaging is often involved.
4. Clearly the gas spore as described in the Monster Manuals is not itself an organism, but rather a spore sac sent out by some kind of creature as a distributive reproductive device. It's quite nifty, considering point #2 - the creature is practicing parasitoidy, getting its offspring to develop in the tissues of a host, by exploiting a common behavior. All of which means that biological mimicry is not the issue at all, but rather merely imitation, a much simpler phenomenon. So cries of "Fuck! A gas spo -- hack, gag, choke," now resound through the corridors.
5. Now for the $64 question: what sort of creature sends out the gas spores? What does mama/papa/whatever look like? Putting aside considerations of metamorphosis for a moment, what do the spores - once combined and gestating - grow up into? (All of these are the same question.) You can probably see the answer coming: no other than the Beholders themselves. Thus neatly converting the only defensive prey tactic against it into a reproductive tactic for itself. Annnnd hence ... no mimicry at all, in the technical sense, merely deception.
I give credit to the awesome D&D with Porn Stars site for its post Rehabilitating the gas spore for the idea that the Beholder is setting up and benefiting from the gas spore, and to the author of the embedded link in that post for remembering reproduction is involved, but the interpretation that the Beholders are reproducing this way is mine. Also, as long as we're linking to fun D&D monster sites, see Dungeons & Dragons: Celebrating thirty years of very stupid monsters and don't miss the Part 2 link at the end.
Minor point: in science-talk, "sentient" is not a word, nor is "sapient." I am forced to upset students about this every year, both philosophically in that human exceptionalism takes it in the nuts yet again, and ideologically in that being an avid science fiction fan does not automatically make one into a more scientifically-minded person.
Best, Ron
Moreno R.:
This thread reminds me of the "sexual education" columns in Italian feminist magazine in the '70... it should be titled "Ask Dr. Ron about monster reproduction" or "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About D&D monsters (But Were Afraid to Ask)"...
What always baffled me was the Gelatinous Cube (maybe because I lost a lot of character to that critter, my old DM loved them...). It's (citing Wikipedia) "a cube that is a perfect ten feet on each side, it is specifically and perfectly adapted to its native environment, the standard, 10-foot (3.0 m) by 10-foot (3.0 m) dungeon corridors which were ubiquitous in the earliest Dungeons & Dragons modules"
So we have:
1) a jelly organism who is a PERFECT cube. No sign of deformation or any effect from his own weight.
2) a perfect adaptation to a PRECISE 10'x10' environment. OK, but... how OLD are these damn dungeons, to have organisms evolved to their exact measures? And how good were the original builders, making HUNDRED OF MILES of perfect 10'x10' tunnels, without any variation or reduction of passage?
And.. how does it perceive his "food"?
Callan S.:
It's kind of like watching a sort inertia of 'this is so and therefore' of real life asserted facts that gets fast enough in it's internal inertia to jump, crusty demon style, a gasp soooo much so that it's as if the gap didn't exist.
I think it'd be fun, if it's on topic, to start explaining the stupidly made up and nonsensical creatures like the platypus or kakapo (video strangely on topic?). No, the actual real life facts may not be used in explaining these dumb ass creatures Gygax made up all those years ago (and drew them badly). In a celebration of 'if it doesn't make sense (to my human mind), it shouldn't exist!'. Also, I like sentient.
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