Deepspawn
Deepspawn are a strange race of Underdark-dwelling aberrations in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, starting Second Edition. They are particularly associated with the Forgotten Realms, and possibly originated there. Although one has a prominent place in Night Below, a deliberately non-Realms adventure.
Possessing a vague resemblance to beholders, Deepspawn resemble spheres of flesh with 40 eyes on retractile eyestalks, three tentacles and three jaws on prehensile necks emerging from their mass. They have only bestial intelligence, but have powerful innate magics, which manifest both in a number of potent spell-like abilities and in their most iconic trait: the ability to spawn unshakeably loyal clones of anything they have eaten.
Realmslore has had this clone-producing ability exploited more than once. In particular, the dwarves of the Realms once fought a vicious civil war by using multiple captured deepspawn to produce enormous armies of expendable clone soldiers; this heavy proliferation of clones was used to explain why dwarven fertility was so low (genetic damage from repeated clone-generations and wide-scale inbreeding) and why dwarven men outnumbered dwarven women until the Morndinsamman used the Thunder Blessing to cure them.
