This War Machine Runs on Nightmare Fuel

Todd Kenreck: Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes has a lot of monsters, but amongst the most horrific is the Cadaver Collector.

Jeremy Crawford: The Cadaver Collector has appeared in several editions of D&D, now returning in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. It is this lumbering creature, the construct, with spikes on it, upon which are the corpses impaled of various warriors.

Now Cadaver Collectors, as we describe them in Mordenkainen's, are originally from the Outer Plane of Acheron. Acheron is this realm of endless war. It's associated particularly with orc and goblinoid deities, as well as many others, where it is often described, there are these giant cubes, like moon-sized cubes, with warring factions on them, and these cubes are slamming together. Upon those war-torn cubes, these large constructs, the Cadaver Collectors, wander around taking the dead and impaling them on the spikes on their backs. Then they are able to summon forth the specters of those fallen warriors.

Now, what happens then, is different necromancers and other spellcasters then sometimes draw these Cadaver Collectors from Acheron into the Material Plane, where then they wander and are even more horrific, since they are so out of place. Often, especially if the summoner is slain and the path back to Acheron is lost, these Cadaver Collectors might wander for centuries, looking for a way back to their war-torn plane, all the while, collecting, as their name implies, more and more cadavers to place upon their back ... Essentially, to give themselves almost this cloak of corpses upon their mighty backs.

Todd Kenreck: So you're basically saying that Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes is this nightmare fuel.

Jeremy Crawford: Yes. Yes. Cadaver Collectors are just one of the many nightmares in this book. Many, many nightmares for the heroes of Dungeons & Dragons to face and hopefully to drive away from the world.

Of course, everything in the Outer Planes is larger than life, because the Outer Planes are, even more so than in the other fantasy realms of D&D, a place of metaphor given flesh. That's why you go to the Outer Planes to see goodness itself manifest, war itself manifest, generosity in the flesh, evil in its darkest forms, right there in front of you, and you can touch it. That is what it's like, so Acheron is just war and really, in many ways, senseless war, going on forever and ever and ever.

 

 

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