ENTRY 26: OVERLORD OF THE FLOODPITS

Already we've made it to the "leaders" of the house; we mentioned that the Cellarspawn Horrors are born from subconscious "daydreams" of the entity ruling the house, but there are also five Overlord horrors that were consciously created to manage the house's five major environments. The first we'll look at is the blue Overlord, which rules the Floodpits! Just like it sounds, these are areas of the house saturated with water to various degrees of plausibility. Not just flooding, but "musty bedrooms mottled with unsettling water stains," areas that are perpetually frozen over, chambers blindingly thick with fog, and even walls of short-circuited electronics. Cool!

The Overlord of this area seems to be especially associated with waterlogged libraries, which is already a nightmare vision for some people with no roaming monsters at all. In this Overlord's default illustration, it apears as a many-tentacled mass with a couple of longer, jointed tentacles ending in long, curly claws. Its head is covered in some kind of shroud or membrane, exposing only tiny yellow eyes and jaws like a deep sea fish. There are huge shards of broken glass impaled through its neck area, and its chest is an eerie antique bookshelf. It's also shown surrounded by books floating through the surrounding water, but each has one of the Overlord's clawed arms emerging from its pages, a really neat visual! I like that the spines of the books also resemble actual vertebrae. Cute. I will say the Overlords feel like they deserve names of their own, and maybe they have them, but I don't know them, so I'm going to call this one Booksy.

In an alternate illustration, Booksy differs quite a bit, in that it looks more like a muscular dinosaur, with only vertebrate-style limbs and a saurian head with blocky skull teeth and a pair of horns. I take it their forms are mutable as necessary, with this form seemingly adapted for when it leaves the water? The floating books are still there, though!

The Overlords also have a fun new mechanic called "Impending," which comes with a number and a mana cost. This allows you to play the creature for this alternate, much lower cost, but it doesn't yet count as a creature; it's only fully summoned once you count down a number of turns, in this case four, a mechanic designed to "give the opponent the sense of a monster bearing down on them." That's a lot of fun, really playing the mechanics for the horror theme!

Booksy also has a mechanic where every time it enters play or attacks, you get to draw two cards, but then you have to discard one, I guess representing how bad Booksy actually is at preserving books. Silly goof! They don't go in the water!!!

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