Bestiary: The Oracle Toad
Image: Author Unknown. Wood Engraving of a Frog Surrounded by Smaller Frogs. Late 19th - Early 20th Century. Public Domain Source.
Oracle Toad
HD 4 (~20 HP), Armor as Leather, Bite as Greataxe
+Constitution, +Charisma, -Dexterity
Knows 4 random spells. When threatened, casts a random spells each round while attempting to flee.
Impulses: To consume books. To bed down for the season. To contemplate from afar. To hop madly.
This colossal toad is almost circular - nearly 10 feet long, 10 feet wide, and a little under 6 feet tall when at rest. It wallows in watering holes, mires, and ditches, preferring to keep low to the ground and out of sight. They are solitary creatures, but sometimes nest in small pods of 2 or 3.
Oracle toads feed on books, scrolls, and other receptacles of language. They can go long periods without eating, but have been known to hunt dictionary salesmen, itinerant priests, and other wandering carriers of texts.
Rumor has it that when asked a question, an oracle toad will croak an answer from the myriad books its consumed. Others say that their wallows are often packed with scrolls, spellbooks, and other valuable texts that proved too difficult to digest. Alchemists pay good money for an oracle toad's liver, a powerful ingredient for divinatory potions.
Originally pulled from the pages of Trilemma Adventures, Michael Prescott and Michael Atlin had this to say about their toad in "The Oracle's Decree":
The Buried Oracle
A giant toad slumbers under the sand, surrounded by a field of dried dung and scraps of book leather. Heelan petitioners may be pouring flasks of water onto it to awaken it; they revere it as an oracle. If awakened, the toad will lash out with its tongue, eating the first thing it sees. If it eats a book or scroll, the toad immediately pronounces the words in the listener's language. It speaks quickly; it does not repeat itself or pause until the book is done.
From time to time, the toad croaks a random phrase from one of the many works it has consumed, which the Heelans take for propecies and inscribe carefully. All of the feces in the area contain fragments of scrolls in a variety of dead languages.
I've run the oracle toad (as I call it) at a couple of tables, but with a few key changes. First, I think it's poor form to set the players up (as "The Oracle's Decree" does) to find a real oracle, only to give them a fake one. I think this sends the wrong message to the players. I want to encourage them to care about the quest they are on, not suspect that they are going to be duped. Instead, I always run this as a random encounter - something weird and unexpected on the road.
Second, I don't love presenting the desert dwelling Heelans (or other locals) as worshipping the creature as a bestial, idiot god. It smacks of orientalism to me - the other's religious beliefs are transparently foolish; leave it to the visiting explorer to show them the light of reason. To avoid this, I try to depict locals as in the know and unimpressed or have the toads live somewhere sufficiently weird and remote that there are no folks that have encountered one.
Before the session, I prepare a short list of topics that the toad has consumed a book about. If the PCs ask a question about one of those topics, I give them a useful answer, couching it as an excerpt from a history or correspondence.
If the PCs ask a general question, I google "[the text of the PC's question] quote" and repeat a passage from the first result on the first page. Sometimes, I'll take a note of particularly juicy quotes to try to actually fold into the fiction. Double points if a PC mocks the toad and then dies in a way anticipated by the quote they were given.
I do like to roleplay the toads in a way that makes it ambiguous whether they are aloof or merely unaware. This tends to spark disagreement and discussion among the players and debates about whether this is a monster at all. I do tempt them with juicy rewards underneath the toad, but the creatures are not inherently violent or threatening. I leave it to the players to decide how much they really know, though I imagine they know everything they need to be an oracle toad.