Covens can holdsignificant sway over the common people in their domains, whether that is by fear or misplaced trust. A party thatis upfront about their desire to take down a coven could be exiled or find that otherwise friendly non-player characters will come to the coven's defense, such as by acting as a humanoid shield. For this reason, taking down a coven could involve politics and moral quandaries. In the computer simulations that the Stanford lab has built based on Trichoplax’s body and motion, Prakash and his team have begun to tweak aspects of the animal’s biology to create new properties that don’t exist in nature. When the team virtually strengthens the protein bonds between Trichoplax’s cells in a computer model, for example, the resulting animal is stiffer and displays new patterns of motion. For Prakash, Trichoplax is a kind of primordial Play-Doh—a way not only to understand animals that exist today but also to discover synthetic animals and materials that could exist, he says. While Prakash agrees that the animal holds great promise for biomedical research, his pursuit of Trichoplax is about more than its practical applications. “I also study it for its beauty and elegance,” he says. The test took place in one of Prakash’s recent inventions, a Ferris wheel–inspired contraption he calls the Gravity Machine. Composed of a thin plastic wheel full of water, the Gravity Machine rotates vertically in front of a powerful microscope, acting as an aquatic treadmill for microorganisms. Even in the narrow disk, which is less than half an inch wide, Trichoplax is so small that finding it with the naked eye is like searching for a dust mote in a gymnasium.

The Feywild represents the intrinsic power of nature: its wildness and beauty, its chaos and unscrupulous dangers. Denizens of the Plane of Faerie can be equally imposing. Even the weakestamong them can create dimensional rifts. The strongest collect knowledge and power over their long lives and don’t part with any of it for free. Use joints, bones and muscles to build creatures that are only limited by your imagination. Watch how the combination of a neural network and a genetic algorithm can enable your creatures to "learn" and improve at their given tasks all on their own. Even if placozoans are not the oldest animals, they’re still some of the weirdest. Trichoplax’s genome, published in 2008, contained a surprising twist, Athula Wikramayake, a developmental biologist at the University of Miami, says. Despite having the simplest bodies of all animals, placozoans carry many of the same genes as humans do, including numerous genes involved in building brains and other complex organs, like those in the digestive system. Placozoans contain far more genetic complexity than scientists ever guessed, Wikramayake says. “The question is, what are they doing with it?” Adventurers who journey to the Feywildmighthappen upon a pixie's glade when seeking out a spot to take a long rest. There, they might hear the giggles of these delicate creatures and have harmless pranks played on them. If the party shows that they have a good sense of humor, pixies might reveal themselves and be more than willing to offer aid. Poor Trichoplax. It doesn’t know how to swim,” Prakash said. “This is going to be the shortest paper ever.”While the current selection of hags top out at a challenge rating of 7, a coven of three hags vastly increases the difficult of an encounter (see "Hag Covens" below). Hag Covens Night hags, however, are strongest when they're aware of their enemies. They can enter the Ethereal Planeto inflict nightmares on a creature, lowering their hit point maximum and depriving them of the benefits of a long rest. Using hags in your game Dusk hag: This type of hag might share its prophetic visionsfor a price, but such informationwill likely lead to suffering rather than good fortune. When the team leaves for the lab, I retreat to my dorm room at the Monterey hostel, defeated. I am not hardcore enough to hunt wild Trichoplax, I think. I take a nap. At 11:32 p.m., my phone lights up. It’s a video text showing Zhong and Soto Montoya huddled around the microscope, looking buoyant. Zhong has found a Trichoplax. “That’s it, 110 percent,” Prakash says. “It’s beautiful, beautiful!” On a computer screen that shows the display from the microscope, Trichoplax looks like a glowing, pulsing orb surrounded by cosmic protoplasm. Soto Montoya finds a second, bigger animal. They sign off and keep scanning each slide, one by one, until 4 a.m.

Night hag: Once creatures of the Feywild, night hags were exiled to Hades. These creatures befoul all good things, turning love into obsession and generosity to selfishness.In my opinion, fey creatures are usually either really, really, REALLY evil or pretty much just temperamental pranksters. They also are often portrayed as very elemental creatures, so pretty much just look at a regular type of Fey you might find in a specific situation and change as much as possible as far as possible and make a story to go along with it. Dungeon Masterscan use the boggle for either a fun side adventure or as a way to introduce the party to larger plot points. A boggle could steal an object from the party out of a desire to cause mischief and lead them on a slippery chase through a busy city. A group of bogglescould play a hilarious game of keep-away, creating Dimensional Rifts to pass a stolen item amongst themselves and filling tight corridors with slippery oil. Some scientists believe that Trichoplax, with its stripped-down body plan and easy-to-manipulate genome, could be a useful model organism for medical researchers. It’s especially intriguing because it breaks the rules that most lab animals follow: Unlike mice or fruit flies, Trichoplax has an indefinite life span, rapidly heals, and never—so far as scientists can tell—develops cancer. “We’re always trying to figure out what the rules are,” says Billie Swalla, a biologist at the University of Washington who studies regeneration in weird animals like acorn worms, which can regrow their heads. Studying rule breakers like Trichoplax, which can tear themselves apart and heal in minutes, could yield insights into the treatment of human injuries like damaged spinal cords, she says. Although there’s still a fair amount of uncertainty about how the earliest animals are related to each other, recent genomic-sequencing studies suggest that placozoans were not the common ancestor to all living animals, and that either sponges or comb jellies came first, David Gold, a paleobiologist at UC Davis, says. Although Trichoplax comes from an older lineage than most animal groups alive today, “there are a few groups that appear to be older,” he notes. Party members might also happen upon a pixie that is helping an injured animal, hosting a tiny faerie ball, or simply serving as a messenger for one of the faerie courts. As enthusiastic and kind-hearted creatures,a pixie can be more of an annoyance than a threat.

When hags must work together, they form covens, in spite of their selfish natures. A coven is made up of hags of any type, all of whom are equals within the group. However, each of the hags continues to desire more personal power. A coven consists of three hags so that any arguments between two hags can be settled by the third. If more than three hags ever come together, as might happen if two covens come into conflict, the result is usually chaos.A D&D party might encounter a hag after investigating a case of missing babies or afterdiscovering a town that has been torn apart by gossip, false accusations, or even nightmares.A solitary green hag or sea hag can be the primary villain for a 1st- or 2nd-level adventure. W hen Prakash and his team reach Monterey, a red tide caused by billions of plankton has turned the water so dark that it looks like obsidian. Crouching in the sheltered harbor of the Monterey marina beside a sailboat christened Diablito, Prakash slides his arm elbow deep into the water and draws up a length of fishing line. This time, the trap is intact. I n Prakash’s lab, located in the leafy bioengineering quad at Stanford University, he and his graduate students, postdocs, and lab technicians are less concerned with figuring out where Trichoplax fits into the story of animal evolution than how it manages to live such a full life—creeping along the ocean floor, sensing its surroundings, eating algae—with such minimal equipment. “Where does behavior come from in a system that doesn’t have neurons?” he asks. He’s also interested in the shape-shifting animal’s basic physical properties: “Is it a liquid? Is it a solid? Is it something in the middle?” Smith and her colleagues have found a series of evenly spaced cells along Trichoplax’s periphery that she thinks may help herd the cilia by secreting a chemical signal that makes them pause. The chemicals are similar to the neurotransmitters that regulate appetite and contractions of the digestive tract in humans, according to the neurobiologist Diego Bohórquez, of Duke University. When many animals are grouped together, a single Trichoplax releasing the chemical can trigger its neighbors to secrete as well, causing the whole group to slow down and graze on algae “much like bison on a grassy plain in Yellowstone,” Borhórquez wrote in a 2018 article in the scientific journal Brain Research.