Xosh

The Ambassador

Xosh was a mind flayer and a Marked of Yog. He was a player character in All Hail Yog, portrayed by Dan Glaser.

“What an impossibly loathsome creature that stands before you, its abominable head held so imperiously high. It has the rough proportions of a human but that is the last humane thing about it. Its very bones pierce its rubbery flesh, producing a bizarre breastplate of hardened chitin about its torso in some horrifying parody of armor. About its thin shoulders, it wears a tattered cape of black silk, its high collar accentuating its nauseating head. Upon its shoulders squats a bulbous squid. Four hooked tentacles conceal an inner radula that no sensible speech could escape from. With those milky white eyes it appraises you arrogantly and, when its voice creeps into your mind, you the arch and wriggle of those tentacles upon your very thoughts.”

History

Xosh is not the man’s name. The man was once an antiquarian, an explorer of crumbled ruins in the remote places of Obsidios, a devourer of knowledge and ancient lore, whose particular fascination was Mount Masarthaga and the fell rites conducted therein. Xosh is the name of the wriggling parasite that crawled into his nostril during one of these expeditions and, through the slow agonizing process of cereamorphosis, transformed him into a mind flayer.
A devoted servant of Hadar the Hungerer, Xosh was dispatched, shortly after achieving maturity, by his dark master to Yogoth to serve as an ambassador to Yog. His task was to ensure that the Black Star honored the agreement between the elder evils and thus took on the Mark of Yog, nominally agreeing to obey. In his vile black heart, Xosh’s true master is Hadar and Hadar alone.

Character

Personality

As an emissary of the all-consuming Hadar, Xosh is supremely arrogant. He views all other lifeforms – notably Yog included – as beneath him and his master and, while able to cooperate with them, considers them pawns rather than allies. Hadar’s hunger, in Xosh, manifests as a hunger for knowledge, a predilection built upon a similar hunger in his antiquarian host. He is fascinated by other creatures – both physically and psychologically – but is as likely to dissect them as he is interrogate them.

Abilities

The ghastly transformation that overcame Xosh’s human host granted him bizarre powers, unlike those found anywhere on Ondûn. A natural psionist, Xosh can achieve effects like onto spellcasting but with no magic involved.
Xosh can only communicate telepathically but, what’s more, can even read the thoughts of those in reach of his mental probe. He has powerful telekinesis, able to levitate and manipulate even enormous objects with his mind. He can inspire fear or madness in his enemies with a glance and can even overwrite their will and insert his own. Most horrifying of all, as an illithid, Xosh survives by devouring the brains of his victims. When he does this, he gains a small sampling of his prey’s last memories, that he can sift through like the pages of a book.

Campaigns

All Hail Yog

• The Heroes: Xosh was one of the four villains summoned by Yog to the Spires of Yog in the heart of Yogoth. In the midst of devouring a brain on the slopes of Mount Masarthaga, Xosh was within the tower when the pillar of radiant sunlight struck the spire and it began to collapse. While he first sought a ride atop Skoura, the mind flayer ultimately relied on his telekinesis to save him – and a sphere of rubble – from crashing to the ground. He threw that rubble, a few psychic blasts and even his own tentacles at the Soulsworn down below – all to no avail. Desperate for information about where the Vessel might have disappeared to, he implore his allies to take one hero alive but they did not listen. Devouring Dortek’s zombified brain, Xosh gained a fractured insight into where the Soulsworn were hiding – somewhere by the sea, somewhere with starlings. Leaping into the First Fissure, Xosh was alarmed to discover Yog’s absence but had the presence of mind to return and ask Neogi where he should go. Instead of the Houses of Torment, he appeared in the Houses of Malady, where the plague doctors were quite unnerved to see him. When he reunited with his companions, he engaged the original Vessel in a strange dialogue, convincing the broken husk to help them in exchange for favor with Hadar. When word came of the attack on Tzal Necros, he argued hardest for confronting them and lead the charge into the fissure.

Name: Xosh 
Ancestry: Mind Flayer 
Born: 842 4A
Height: 5'11"
Weight: 130 lbs
Hair: None 
Eyes: White 
Alignment: Lawful Evil 
First Appearance: The Heroes (Episode 1)
Most Recent Appearance: The Heroes (Episode 10)
Played By: Dan Glaser