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I once watched a very interesting video about a race of beings which come from another dimension and seek to gain control over other dimensions through possessing hosts and bring more of their kind to the plant/world. The unique thing about them is that one being is actually like hundreds of small entities (look like worms that weave together) that alone have not the intellect to be their own person and so they seek each other out and create a being together. They then find rifts to other dimensions and take a host, filling them up with these worms and eating them slowly while they parade around as them. Does that ring a bell for anyone? I’d really like to use them in a campaign I’m making, I’d appreciate the help.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Are the creatures in the video from D&D 3.5e, or are you simply looking to recreate them with a D&D analogue? \$\endgroup\$
    – Chemus
    Feb 5, 2022 at 14:27

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Tsochari

It sounds like you're describing the tsochari, a species of aberrations from the 3.5e book Lords of Madness. The tsochari aren't from another dimension per se, but they do hail from a distant, inhospitable world, and travel to human worlds through ancient gates between their realms:

The tsochari hail from a world distant in space, a cold and lightless place so remote that the sun is little more than a bright star in a black sky. Long ago, evil wizards or cultists built gates linking certain terrible ruins in the normal world with the horrible world of the tsochari. Through these ancient gates, the tsochari steal into the world to roam human lands and infiltrate human society.

They can infest the bodies of other living creatures, either as a backseat-driving passenger, or just fully replacing the original creature's nervous system and taking control of the body, in both cases slowly consuming their host:

Wear Flesh (Su): A tsochar can bore its way into a helpless living creature’s body, slipping its ropy tendrils into the spaces between organs and muscles and disappearing into the victim. [...] The tsochar can choose to replace or inhabit the victim [...] A tsochar inhabiting a humanoid’s body feeds on the creature’s blood and tissues [...] Tsochari that have replaced a humanoid slowly devour their new shell from the inside out.

They are composed of many worm-like organisms that are not independently sentient, but become intelligent when enough of them have fused together into one creature:

A tsochar is not actually a single living creature, but instead an aggregate being. Each of the dozens of coiling tentacles and limbs that seem to comprise its body is, in fact, a living creature in its own right, known as a strand. [...] Carefully detached from the rest of the body, a tsochar strand could live on indefinitely, but it would be virtually mindless. Only in close association with twenty or thirty similar strands, linked by nerve ganglia and blood vessels into a tangle, do the tsochar strands achieve a collective sentience and sense of self.

A young tsochar might only consist of 20-30 small strands, as described above, but as they age they become larger, both in the size of the individual strands and the number:

Tsochari grow larger as they grow older, adding more strands than they lose. [...] Very old tsochari might consist of a hundred or more strands, some close to 20 feet long and 3 inches thick.

The description in Lords of Madness seems to suggest that they primarily travel to other worlds in order to steal magic and arcane knowledge, but it does also describe their society as very devout in their worship of their aberrant gods, and especially the deity Mak Thuum Ngatha (a.k.a. "the Nine-Tongued Worm"), whose priests direct the tsochari to plunder and spread across other worlds:

Priests view the plundering and sacrifice of otherworld races (such as humans) as a holy mandate, and constantly seek to bring the worship of the Nine-Tongued Worm to new spheres.

As KRyan points out, while the tsochari are native to the material plane, their deity Mak Thuum Ngatha is an entity from the Far Realm, a plane of chaos and madness. The Far Realm is strongly associated with aberrations generally and is presented as the origin of several other aberration-type creatures. It's possible that your memory, or the video you watched, has conflated the nature of their deity (or some of the other aberrations) with the tsochari themselves, which would explain the slight discrepancy over their origins.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Notably, while tsochari aren’t, Mak Thuum Ngatha is from the Far Realm. This could easily explain where the confusion came from—for a long time I just assumed the tsochari did too. \$\endgroup\$
    – KRyan
    Feb 5, 2022 at 13:28
  • \$\begingroup\$ @KRyan good point - so noted. \$\endgroup\$
    – Carcer
    Feb 5, 2022 at 13:50

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