Few things in life will prepare you for the sound that aberrations make, not all of them,
sure, but most of them sound absolutely vile, almost as disgusting as many of them look,
and believe me, no artist can really do justice to the roiling, terrible, horrific, loathsome,
evil and yet maddeningly pitiable appearance of such things as should never have found
themselves in our dimensions in the first place.
Where you can find either a currently occuring or the devastating legacy of a far realm incursion
into the D&D Multiverse, you will tend to find Gibberlings, they are almost like the
first swallows of spring, or the first bloated blowflies of summer on the desperate hunt
for food and fornication in the very worst places... that is gibberlings for you, on
the cosmic scale of things, they are no better than vermin, and what is worse, is that there
are just enough similarities between us and the gibberlings to give a very disturbing
insight, that as low, bestial and savage as humanoids can be, there is always room for
them to be worse... the gibberlings are the worst.
The gibberlings have been with the game since very early on, I know they appear in the first
edition Fiend Folio, which means they may have first appeared in the UK's White Dwarf
magazine, but researching who invented them is a bit tricky as the author used a pseudonym
"Underworld Oracle", I found one sage who states this was the writing duo of Lou Nisbet
and Phil Alexander, since then the gibberlings have appeared in almost every edition of D&D
and with good reason...
they are horrible, weird and wretched beings that pose a sudden and terrible threat to
any other creatures nearby.
I see Gibberlings as creatures which have devolved to the point that all that matters
to them, above all else, is to survive, and that means kill, eat and breed, to the exclusion
of all other things.
I also don't think the gibberlings are all one species, far from it, I think this is
just the end form of many common humanoids of the Underdark and similar places on other
worlds, where they have simply been too mutated and corrupted by foul, alien energies to be
anything else but a gibberling, they could even be the result of a gibbering mouther
that was somehow cured of its condition, split back into its many different bodies, but with
a mind still shattered and insane from the ordeal, never to recover fully and still a
terrible danger to other living beings.
Still, gibberlings all look the same, but each is horrible in their own special little
way, serious mutations not obvious at first, I mean, gibberlings travel in large mobs constantly,
so picking out individuals is never easy, grabbing a dead one to examine is also a bad
idea, I will get to why in a moment, first lets go over some of their common traits.
They are small, hunch backed humanoids that look like a troll, a werewolf and a diseased
goblin somehow mated and produced offspring, they are pale, where bare skin is not covered
in a cake of filth, with large pointed ears and a face that looks disturbingly humanoid,
but with a bestial jaw similar to a tasmanian devil with far too many teeth, they have black,
gleaming eyes that reflect torchlight in the darkness and they seem to grin all the time,
thanks to their fangs simply being too large for their jaw to close properly, so they tend
to slaver, drool and have breath like a sewer breeze.
They are very muscular and their metabolism is such that they constantly move, twitching,
shaking, twisting and snarling and slashing with their overly long arms and claws, or
the crude weapons they often carry, either of shaped and sharpened bone or basic metal
short swords that seem to be the only worked metal tools they will ever use or show any
interest in, other that to use the object to beat another creature to death like a blunt
improvised weapon, the short swords are ideal for how they tend to attack though, where
they get such things, nobody knows.
Gibberlings tend to look furred, but really they have the same sort of body hair distribution
as a human, they have long black hair on their head, neck, shoulders and part way down their
spine, they have think hair at the groin and more sparse hair on their legs and arms, they
never wear clothing or armor of any kind, they don't mark themselves with pigments,
they don't wear ornaments or carry any sort of treasure, they don't have a culture, they
don't have a recognisable language other than that noise you heard, some sages speculate
this may also function like some sort of echo location, though I doubt this,
Gibberlings are always badly infested by all sorts of parasites, lice and fleas being the
least dangerous, they also tend to spread fungal infections from their slashing claws
and a bite has a good chance of passing on a nasty dose of filth fever.
They are very nocturnal creatures, they have almost no protection from the sun, so exposure
to it will cause their skin to blister and invariably get oozing, very painful looking
infections, the gibberlings are, as you can imagine, never comfortable, always hungry
and always hunting, they never rest, they either sleep or are on the go, at full speed,
howling and screaming, only pausing long enough to kill and eat, or to smash objects in their
way, or things they don't understand that seem out of place, which is basically anything
that is not part of a cave or a big tree... but they will attack, tear down and try to
eat a tree if they don't have anything else around to kill and consume.
The major weakness of the gibberlings is their fear and revulsion of light, natural bright
sunlight is the only thing they seem to fear, along with fire, so one can keep them at bay
by surrounding oneself with open flames, and escaping into daylight is really your best
bet, because all gibberlings will chase you and fight you until they either kill and eat
you, or die themselves, it is completely impossible to control these things via any method other
than magic, and they fear nothing other than light and fire, so can not be intimidated.
Thankfully they also have no concept of combat tactics, they only have one, which is overwhelm
with superior numbers and then tear their victim to pieces, not waiting for the victim
to be dead as they start to feed is another hallmark of these monsters, they also eat
any of their own which is either dead or can no longer fend for itself.
The exception to this is the Brood gibberlings, their only form of procreation, as far as
anyone has been able to tell, is with these mutant variants, and they are so revolting...
ok, brace yourself, this is how the gibberlings increase their hordes number all the time.
Brood gibberlings are not always present in a horde, if that is the case, the horde is
doomed to eventually get killed off or consume itself, also, Brood gibberlings can't survive
without fairly constant exposure to the corrupting energies of the Far Realm, this is what allows
them to survive the breeding process, otherwise it is as deadly to them as it is to the creature
they breed with, also, it tends to give them even more extreme and random mutations compared
to other gibberlings and they are a little bit larger sometimes, but not overly much,
perhaps they just tend not to hunch over as much because of their condition... see, gibberlings
don't appear to have any reproductive organs, at all, none of them do, and yet a brood gibberling
is infested with offspring.
The mysteries of gibberling reproduction were revealed in the module The Gates of Firestorm
Peak, a great adventure where a lot of the far realm concepts began to take shape.
In the adventure boxed set the author, Bruce Cordell, the legend, mentions the brood gibberling,
which gives birth to larvae called gibberslugs, which writhe beneath the skin of the brood
gibberling, I mean the horrible things actually burrow around under the skin, in the flesh
of the brood gibberling.
They are injected into the flesh of anyone the brood gibberling bites, including other
gibberlings, well, usually other gibberlings, thankfully they tend to prefer to eat other
creatures, and yes, the gibberlings don't care at all if a victim is full of gibberslugs
or not, they will eat those also, some gibberslugs will actually survive this and simply infest
the gibberling that ate the hunk of meat they happened to be in, gibberlings are not big
on chewing their food.
The slugs then grow steadily and consume the body of their host from the inside, eventually
bursting out through the skin, if you are thinking chest burster alien scene, you are
right, but it doesn't hide quietly in a victim before then, no, the entire gestation is agony
as they victim is chewed up while still alive.
A brood gibberling can actually control those gibberlings it has created, leading to the
development of "clans" of the monsters, clustering around their brood sire, the control is limited,
I mean, gibberlings are not very intelligent, give them a choice between a gold coin and
a pile of copper coins, they will always take the larger pile, because more is more, less
is less, they don't understand that things can be more valuable in an of themselves,
they also tend to destroy anything they don't understand, which is a lot of things.
If you delve into the pages of Dragon magazine number 265, the option to play a gibberling
is presented in an article written by Lloyd Brown the third, in this we find that certain
rare genius gibberlings can actually function as pretty basic playable characters, and for
ease of play, they have their own gibbering language and can even learn to understand
and speak common... sure, you can include such rare freaks, obviously mutated brains
could result in this sort of variant, but it would be extremely rare and really, they
are such a violent, stupid and hungry species, I find it unlikely they could survive long,
even in the company of a bunch of very tolerant adventurers, these are not creatures that
should ever be considered cute or endearing, Owlbears make better companions than gibberlings,
both of them express their will by biting chunks out of you, the owlbear at least is
going to stop biting you, the gibberling will not, you will have to put an axe in its brain
meat for that.
Once a gibberling gets a taste for a species, that is it, it will only ever see those creatures
as food afterwards, so, associate with them at your own folly is what I say on that.
Did I mention they are infested with parasites and hate light and fire?
Yeah, great addition to an adventuring group, sure, that will work out fine.
No, if you want to do that, just borrow these abominations from Hearthstone which ripped
off the name and some traits of the Gibberlings and turned them into this... what is the word
I am looking for... chibi?
Cutified?
I dunno... this.
I am not judging anyone who loves these things, that is what they are designed for, clearly,
but I would rather spring them on players with some random spell or magic effect that
suddenly transforms the snarling, horrific gibberlings into a bunch of these fluffy little
critters... that would be pretty hilarious actually.
There is room for cute in the game, sure, I'm still going to use it to bend your mind
and make you question your characters very soul though, everything is a story telling
tool.
Sorry, bit of a mini rant there, its just that there is more artwork for cute gibberlings
now than the original version, so I had to see a lot of these things while making this
video.
It is what it is.
Gibberlings are creatures of darkness, they are found underground and occasionally the
surface world, in the darkest forests and jungles, in arctic areas where the sun doesn't
rise for months, when caught out in the daylight, gibberlings will usually burrow just under
the dirt and sleep there until the sun goes away, they then all tend to burst out of the
ground in full howling, snarling and hooting activity, which is not something you want
to come across suddenly without expecting them being there, however, they are pretty
much sitting ducks when sleeping this way, in the case where they can't burrow under
the surface, they will simply seek any shelter from the sun they can find quickly, or curl
up into a fetal posture and try to rest even as they get really bad sunburn.
Aside from the slight control of the brood gibberlings, they serve no master and no purpose
other than random death in the darkness.
Tracking them is as easy as following their path of destruction and murder, but it invariably
just leads underground into the deepest and most dangerous parts of the Underdark, often
gibberlings seem to move from one area of far realm corruption to another, like they
can sense the energy there and are drawn to it, even though it seems just as harmful them
them as other living beings, it tends to not be as deadly and gibberlings are tough creatures,
hardy as dwarves and frenetic as quicklings, savage as a gnolls and as stupid as ogres,
gibberlings provide that thing which D&D sometimes really needs... a creature that is going to
kill you unless you kill it first, that you can not intimidate or charm, that is not inherently
evil, they are mostly chaotic neutral, but do evil seeming things, such as eat live babies
and such, because that is simply what they do, its just veal to them, they don't feel
any malice or gain pleasure from the suffering and pain of other creatures, they are just
very hungry and have a heavy metabolic load they need to keep constantly fed.
For stats, there are currently no official 5th edition stats in publication, but there
are a lot of versions on dndbeyond.com/homebrew/monsters so go browse the offerings of your fellow
fans and pick whichever one suits your needs and fits the concepts the best.
Just remember, gibberlings attack in swarms, in 5th edition, large numbers of opponents
is very, very deadly, so keep their individual Challenge Rating low and they are very primitive,
they don't have traits like pack tactics or anything like that, just tooth, claw, indomitable
urges and weight of numbers...
it is sufficient.
If you like this sort of video, I have a lot more for you on my channel, thanks for joining
me, my name is AJ Pickett and as always, I will be back with more for you, very soon.