Wyrms

On the Taste of Wyrm

When Emperor Mando first tasted the meat of the purple wyrm, he declared it to be unrivaled among the bestial meats.  His bounties on the great wyrms made them a rarity east of the Elterspines, and you can still wander among the enormous bones of the failed Amaranthine Ranch in Mount Baldero.

While the emperor and his family claimed that the flesh of the wyrm was delicious, everyone who has eaten wyrm in recent time reports that the flesh is as vile as gall.  The sole exception to this is Queen Chessaline, who attended several wyrmhunts in her youth and has spoken highly of the meat.

The first theory claims that the taste of wyrmflesh was exaggerated by the sycophants and courtiers that thronged the palace like feathers on a cock.

The second theory maintains that there is something quixotic in wyrmflesh, which is only pleasing to the nobility, while those of common stock will merely be repulsed.  After all, it is not meant for them.

from Elminage Gothic

On Dragons and Wyrms

Dragons are enthroned among the blues and whites of the clear sky, and their bodies are filled with purest fire.  In their chests, the heaviest organ is their heart.  They speak dismissively of their cousins.

Wyrms dwell in the earth, and their bodies are filled with poison.  Their heaviest organ is the liver, which is of an incomparable solidity, being nearly as dense as lead.  They speak constantly of dragons, and of the theft of their birthright.  Where dragons can be roused to wrath, wyrms are melancholy and obsessive.

While dragons will collect, catalog, and display their collections, wyrms will compulsively swallow their hoards.  It is believed that the gold in their bodies leaches into their blood, and is the source of both their great poisons and their great bitterness.

The other behavior unique to wyrms is dust-eating.  They compulsively swallow vast amounts of silts and clays, only to regurgitate it when they become too bloated to breathe.  In some parts of the world (primarily sections of riparian Underworld), vast tracts are composed of this regurgitant.  It is a fertile soil, but nothing woody will grow upon it.  Wyrmlands are filled with enormous recumbent ferns and mottled fungi.

The Inheritance of Wyrms

To believe the drooling stories of wyrms is to believe that they once soared through the sky on a dozen black wings.  They could turn the winds to poison, and their shadows burned anyone they passed over.

The wyrms will tell you of how the dragons stole this from them, although the theft seems to be less of a robbery and more of a wrongly-assigned inheritance.  Dragons, they will tell you, were originally meant to be small, clever companions, much like cats.

And then the wyrm will sigh, and jealousy will seep from the cold tonnage of their livers.  They will eat you without ever thinking of you, fixating only on this great injustice.  Every time a wyrm bites, or crushes, or poisons, the wyrm will imagine that it is harming a dragon.

It is the hateful equivalent of calling out the wrong name during sex.

Culture

Wyrms dwell in the wild places of the world.  Both Celestialists and the naga regard them as semi-divine creatures, and so have some passing interactions with them.  Notably, the princes of Abasinia must be knighted by Glauroch, the Conqueror Wyrm, before ascending to the throne.

Glauroch knights them with his tail spine, which is as long as any sword, and twice as thick.

Wyrms are intelligent and wise, but they are also melancholy and quick to hate.  They cannot easily be reasoned with, and most successful interactions with wyrms involve nurturing resentment towards a third party.

Biology

Like bedbugs, wyrms practice traumatic insemination.  That's what the tail spike is for (contrary to most published bestiaries).

Once they reach adulthood, wyrms are almost always solitary.  During periods of loneliness, they will seek out members of the opposite sex that they encountered in their juvenile years.

Wyrms undergo a form of metamorphosis, changing between three different color morphs: white, red, and purple.  These changes seem to be driven entirely by respect.  A wyrm that is respected will darken to purple, while a wyrm that has especially low self-respect will eventually become pallid and thin.

None of this applies to tatzlwyrms (green wyrms) who appear to be a separate species.  Other wyrms consider them to be closer to common serpents than to themselves.

They live about twice as long as dragons.

by Ville Sinkkonen

Combat Stats

All wyrms can burrow though dirt about as fast as a man can walk.  Stone is difficult, but not impassible.  They have terrible vision, but incredible hearing (and tremorsense).

All wyrms have a particular poison.  These poisons never affect anyone who is currently poisoned, or any creature that is poisonous.  These poisons apply to both their bite and their breath attack.

Wyrms are immune to all poisons, but ingested poisons cause a pleasant intoxication the first 1d3 times a wyrm consumed a new poison.  Cure poison spells deal damage equal to [sum] without any Save allowed.  Bezoars (antivenom) deals 1d6 damage if eaten, while a carbuncle deals 1d6 damage each turn until the wyrm is dead.

Def plate  Bite 3d6+swallow
Burrow 4  Int 10  Mor 10

Breath Attack -- Usable every 1d4 rounds, and affects an areas within 50'.  The air is as opaque as fog for 1 round.  This inhaled poison is slow, and does not take effect until the end of the target's next turn.  However, the poison is especially potent, and all targets Save at a -4 penalty.

Whirlpool -- Usable when burrowed in dirt, after a minute of preparation.  Creates a whirlpool 100' across.  Creatures who fail a Movement check fall 20' and are subject to a free Bite attack.

Tatzlwyrm (Green Wyrm)
HD 7

Tatzlwyrms cannot burrow.

Tatzlwyrm Poison - As sleep.

Albicant (White) Wyrm
HD 8

Albicant Poison - 1d6 damage, ongoing until Con save.

Rubicant (Red) Wyrm
HD 9

Rubicant Poison - 2d6 damage, ongoing until Con save.

Amaranthine (Purple) Wyrm
HD 10

Amaranthine Poison - 2d6 damage, ongoing until Con save.  While you are poisoned, the Amaranthine Wyrm can read your surface thoughts and remember your memories.  You get -4 to hit it, and it gets +4 to hit and Save against you.  Each round, it has a 1-in-6 chance to remember something extremely useful from your memory.

Aura of Authority - All authority is diminished within 200' of a purple worm.  Characters get a penalty to all d20 rolls based on their social status.  -4 for beggars and weirdos, -3 for decent folk, -2 for respected gentry, -1 for nobility, and no penalty for royalty.

Glauroch, the Conqueror Wyrm
Stats as an amanranthine wyrm.  Max HP.  All damage from non-royalty is reduced to 1.  Wizard.

d6 Dungeon Merchants

I've been playing Crypt of the Necrodancer and I've realized that I like the idea of bumping into merchants in the middle of a dungeon.

Among other things, it makes the dungeon able to replace one of the functions of the city, without making it any safer.

from Crypt of the Necrodancer

1 - Dungeon Bugs

Something like long-legged roaches, each as tall as a child.  They scamper like children, and laugh like goats with a mouth full of dice.  They're friendly, but callous.  You'll find them on the ceilings of rooms,

They taste terrible, and so are largely ignored by predators.  They have little interest in any task requiring their attention for more than a few moments, and are all competing with each other to collect enough shiny crap to attract a mate.

No one has ever seen a female dungeon bug, or knows what happens when a dungeon bug gets hitched.  The dungeon bugs themselves might not even know.  They rarely talk about their secret nests, except to boast of them.

A voice from the ceiling, "By the seven fucks, no, you don't want to go that way.  Two silver and I'll tell you which way is most goodwise!  And a refund if you don't thank me when you go to bed tonight!"

"That's my corpse!  Look, I marked by it by biting off the earlobe--I have it right here.  I was saving it for later, times like these.  You can have the pockets, though, for 20 silver.  Eat my eyes if I can go any lower.  Just eat em!"

"Just climb down this shaft and head towards the smell of seaweed. That's my cousin's store!  You can buy a pickled piercer for a penny!"  (The Pickled Piercer costs 30s.  You can buy a barrel of pickled goblins for 200s, though, which counts as 100 rations.)

2 - The King of Hens

A ponderous thing with pale skin like a drowned man.  A full head taller than a tall man.  Thin limbs, stretched and slightly bent, like ghastly taffy.  The hands are huge flippers, like hands that have been run over by a cartoon car.  They open and close slowly.

The feet are chicken feet, and they are strong.

The chest is huge, and the belly is stretched to bursting.  It is wearing the remains of a red robe, fallen off the shoulders and only held on by a belt around the waist.  It is filthy and matted, but it was once silk.  It's back, chest, and arms are all covered with lashes, both old and new.

The face is shambles, perhaps from unlucky birth, perhaps from a creative torturer.  The face has little to do with a chicken's, and even less to do with a human's.  It is, at least, a bit beaked, where the cleft palate climbs into the sinuses.  The dark, watery eyes are entirely unlike poultry, however.

The King of Hens is accompanied a quartet of small, loud women.  They are the king's court.  They will announce what is for sale today, and what the prices are.  If you agree to buy something, one of the hags will stay with you while the other three lead the creature around a corner.  After listening to a few minutes of cracking whips and ragged sobs, they will return with a bloody egg.  Inside the egg is your purchase.

Suggested Items (Roll a 1d6 twice)

1 - A nutritious egg.  (Counts as a ration.  DO NOT INCUBATE IT.)
2 - A random curse. Latches onto the nearest person when the egg is broken.
3 - Black sugar.
4 - Midnight wind.

3 - The Hive Dead

A cyclopean door.  On it, someone has written "Put the sword on the ground and step out of the room.  Wait until they offer the right payment.  Stay away from their holes."

Inside is a cavernous room.  The center of the ceiling is dominated by a huge crack, going upwards.  You seem to be at the bottom of a very deep abysm.

The walls are studded with holes, each one about two feet wide.  The holes are roughly circular, and are arranged roughly as honeycombs are.  (This is the most efficient way to stack circles.)  There are several hundred of these holes on the back wall of the room, and several hundred more up inside the ceiling crack.

Each hole is home to an undead.  They are not visible in the gloom, but they are watching the center of the room with an unblinking intensity.  When an item (or items) is placed in the center of the room, an undead will approach it after 1d6*1d6 minutes, and place a roughly equivalent item across from it.

If you enter the room and take the offered item, you have just sold your original item.  If you wait another 1 hour, the undead will return and reclaim the item it offered as a trade--there is a 50% chance that another undead will appear after 1d6*1d6 minutes and make a similar offer.  If you reclaim your original item, the deal will be cancelled, the dead will be offended, and all future responses will take twice as long.  If you take both items, all 660 corpses will attack you.  (Stats as zombies, Int 10, movement as human.)

Some items that might be offered:

• The bones of a horse.
• A suit of plate mail in perfect condition.
• The lost crown of a local principality.
• A spellbook (contains 3 pyromancer spells).
• A large package of ancient tea.  (Worth 1000s).

If anyone dies in the room, the undead will command the dead to rise.  The fallen character will arise as a new undead, painfully gag down all of their coins and gems, and dig a new hole in the wall.

4 - Charlie Pox

He looks more like a flock of freckles than anything else.  He appears on your belly, using your bellybutton as a mouth.  He's cheeky and talks fast.  He'll crack jokes to put you at ease.

Buy something why don't ya!  I've traveled all this way!

This is Charlie.  You probably caught him from a rat bite or something.

• Mustard! 3s
• Lockpicks! 20s
• Picture of a Duck! 30s
• Magic Ring! 500s (Alternate Self Ring)

The purchase will be produced from your own body.  If Charlie likes you (and Charlie likes most people), this will be orally.

If you try to hold Charlie hostage, you'll get sick.  Real sick.  Best just to buy something and let him pass one.  The prices aren't even that bad, don't ya know!  He's doing you a favor!

Once he's gone, all he leaves behind is a patch of freckles in the shape of a winking smile and a mild cold.

5 - Sir Gavin Ghastlecrumb

A brute in a suit.

Picture a man shaped like a gorilla.  Wrap him in the most expensive clothes that money can buy.  Give him a fierce beard and a brilliant top hat.  Make him love violence the way that scared soldiers love their mothers.  Make him loud and brusque and ambiguously British.

When you find him, he's spooling intestines from a naga, draping them over a fire, and eating them, all in a single continuous assembly line.  He has a little silver fork.  (It's a regular fork.  It just looks small in his hands.)

He hopes you will give him a reason to kill you, and will tell you as much.  He is a devout Hesayan, and if you are also a member of the flock, he cannot attack you unprovoked.  He has his afterlife to consider.

Why is he selling things?  He has too much loot to carry.

• 16 swords.  Must by all of them.  50s
• A magic bird that can learn any song, and will invent new ones besides.  100s.
• A duke's son from a nearby city, worth 1000s in random.  300s.

The other stuff in his bag is equivalent to a dragon's hoard, but he's not selling it.

Stats as a giant.  If you miss him with a melee attack, make a Str check.  If you fail, Gastlecrumb breaks it.  If he fails a Save, he can choose to lose 10 HP and reduce the effect of whatever he just saved against.

6 - Machinduma

A coiled machine sits alone in a dark room.  It looks like the polished extrusion of some massive crustacean, with gently fluted crests and warped gullies.  The front is the tallest part, and you must slip between some flying buttresses to reach the "front" of the machine.

You can only see the seams if you look close.  (Those who have seen both will recognize similarities to the Egg of Drume.)

There are two alcoves here, set into the machine like eye sockets.  Above them, you can read the words "One is taken, the other is improved."

If you put two objects into the alcoves, the chambers will slowly recess and then close off.  Out of the two objects, the more valuable one will be taken by the machine.  The less valuable object will be returned in an improved form.

Shitty swords will be made excellent.  A magical sword will be made amazing.  A non-magical item may be made into a magical one, but the enchantment will be a trifling one.

A living creature that is improved will be given a random beneficial mutation.

If you do a lot of exchanges with the Machinduma, and if you show a certain ambivalence for human life, it will start offering you fetch quests.  It will extrude soft white disks with writing on them, which dessicate and crumble away from the warm, bloody interior of the machine.

People that are taken by the Machinduma are not lost.  You will see them again, in a different city, at a different time, on some different business.  They will have a different name, and they will not recognize you.  They will have a different history and speak accurately of a different home town (very far from where they are now).  They are always fetching an item.

The Machinduma has stats as four ogres in full plate, fighting in tight square formation.

See Also

d6 More Dungeon Merchants

Dream Merchants

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Stuff to Buy

The Metal Earth has finally birthed a book.  Check it out here.

Patrick has translated Gawain and the Green Knight, which seems like an immensely Patrick thing to do.  You should buy it in order to one-up that one guy who won't stop talking about how much Appendix N he's read.

Cosmic Monster: Geminoids

This is a continuation of my series on the non-Euclidean, this time a non-Euclidean monster.

Imagine a 2-dimensional world, full of 2-dimensional castle and 2-dimensional people.  Now imagine a person standing to the left of that world, so that their body doesn't intersect with it in any way.  Now imagine that they have a couple of paper puppets, and that they insert into the 2-dimensional world, making them stand on top of that 2D castle as if they belonged there.

Now you know what a geminoid is.

completely inaccurate
a 2-dimensional drawing of a 4-dimensional fellow
and the geminoids should be larger relative to the puppeteer

They look like twins, with a strange look about them.

Their shapes are crude, with odd ridges and flat spots, like wax pressed into the shape of a human.  They seem like imitations, because they are.  They wear thin cloaks to obscure their clumsy shapes.

They are hand-puppets, pieces of a much larger creature that is projected into our world.  The puppeteer cannot be seen, cannot be felt, cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.  It is sideways to our world, and you cannot reach it any easier than Mario can turn sideways and leave your television.

Beneath their cloaks, they do not wear much.  They are always hot to the touch.  The puppeteer, floating in the vacuum of the void, struggles to radiate heat.  There is no air there.  And so the hand-puppets must manage the temperature of the entire beast.

Sometimes the puppeteer relaxes, and turns the puppets slightly sideways.  One arm might shrink to a stump; another arm might grow thick and untextured.  A normal-seeming eye might relax into a colored spot on featureless skin, like a giant freckle.  If you pull back the hood of a sleeping geminoid, this is what you will see.

(I will speak of geminoids in the plural.  This deception is for your players.)

Their arms are as bony as their fused ribs.  Their legs are thick, calloused things, made to support more weight than you'd expect.

If you watch closely, you will notice that geminoids don't seem to breathe.  Their extra-long breaths form condensation in cold places, but their chests don't rise and fall.  This is because the lungs are in the puppeteer, not the puppet (although the puppeteer must still breath through his hands).

Inside a geminoids spindly body, you will find almost nothing except muscle, bone, and circulatory system.  Some of these will seem illogical or impossible, such as an artery that forms a loop with itself, and connects to no other part.  (Their heart and lungs are located inside the puppeteer--you will not find them.)

what looks like levitation is really just a geminoid raising its hand behind the scenes

If the attack deals low damage, this may indicate that they are striking you with their puppet-limbs, like you would expect a skinny fellow to do.  If the attack deals high damage, this may indicate that the geminoid has curled themselves up into a ball and flown at you, as if hurled telekinetically.

Geminoids can hit you a lot harder than you think.  (A hand-puppet curled up into a fist can hit you a lot harder than a man the size of a hand-puppet.)

Geminoid
HD 6  (HP 24)  Def chain  Slam 1d10 each
Move *  Int 10  Mor 4

If you define them according to the format of a game system, geminoids have a lot of abilities.  But once you grasp the concept, it's really simple.

Shared Body -- Geminoids share an HP pool: 24 points.  They also share their weight, which fluctuates depending on how much of the overall creature remains in the void (which has no gravity).  They share a blood supply and a mind.  They function as two creatures against AoE damage, but against spells that target creatures, treat them as a single creature.

Flight -- One geminoid can fly anywhere within 20' of the other geminoid, provided the other geminoid remains on the ground.  (This is equivalent to the puppeteer using one hand to pull themself higher while reaching with the other hand.)

Exit -- A geminoid can leave our dimension.  This looks like the creature being sucked down its own bellybutton, and then shrinking until it is just a small sphere of flesh the size of a basketball.  It looks like new types of skin are flowing from the asshole on the back of the basketball and swirling down the bellybutton on the front.  Smaller and faster and then it is gone.  (This is equivalent to the puppeteer taking his hand-puppet off the stage.)

The puppeteer needs to have both hands in our dimension in order to hold on.  Without at least one geminoid to anchor it, it will come untethered, and starve to death in the void.

A geminoid can grab a character and pull them sideways into the void.  This requires one turn to grab, and another turn to pull them sideways.  The character gets a Cha save to resist, and if they are holding on to something, they also get a Cha save.  If they are tied down, the geminoid must break the ropes before it can pull them sideways.

Once a character has been pulled into the void, they gain 5 Trauma and begin to suffocate and overheat.  There is no light in the void.  The geminoid can attempt to throw them away or pass them to the unborn twins (see below).

Entrance -- A geminoid that is in the void can enter the world the same way it left.  It can appear anywhere within 20' of its twin, even on the other side of walls.

The puppeteer may carry items on its extradimensional body, similar to a bag of holding.

Unborn Twin -- Every geminoid has 1d3-2 (min 0) immature buds.  The yare the unborn twins gestating in the void, like unfinished hand puppets.  If it needs reinforcements, the geminoid can put these unborn twins into the world, effectively doubling the number of geminoids.  The unborn twins have the same stats and abilities as their siblings, they just look wet and unfinished (because they are) and have AC as unarmored.

Full Entrance -- The puppeteer has no reason to ever enter our dimension.  It has no reason to.  Besides, it is too Thick to exist here, much like a puppeteer can never put their whole body atop a paper-thin diorama.  (The only reason I can think: it might need to pass its body through our dimension to hide on the other side from a larger predator.)

Still, nothing is preventing the puppeteer from pulling its whole body sideways and materializing in front of a stunned party.  This would make it look like an inside-out octopus, with each of its four tentacles connected to an inside-out human.  Viewed from the side, its head looks like a three-dimensional version of a CAT scan of the human head, magnified to monstrous proportions.

These would be inappropriate structures for Super Mario World
A geminoid's true body is an inappropriate body for our world.

Extradimensional -- The puppeteer can see if you are carrying a bag of holding.  It can rip it open and steal its content without you ever knowing.



Biology

When describing geminoids and the puppetmaster, remember that they are not natives of the Void.  (True natives have no interest in an incomplete dimension, and would actually struggle to affect it in a systematic way.)

This is because they were human before they were aliens.  They have adapted to the liminal spaces between worlds, like penguins, pelicans, or flying fish.

It is believed that the first proto-geminoids were created by mishaps while investigating extradimensional spaces.  (Beware the bag of holding.  Never allow the extradimensional space to detach from the burlap and attach to you.)

They are not a true species.  They are created by the induction of a fourth-dimensional uterine prolapse during the first trimester.

Psychology

Their minds are completely human.  They are not Outsiders.  (But they know strange things.  They have met Outsiders.)

When they are born, they seem almost like a regular pair of twins.  The puppeteer is still undeveloped at this point, and they seem like two creatures instead of one.

The easiest way to test a newborn is to attempt to separate it from its twin.  Newborn geminoids cannot be moved more than a few feet away from their twin.

If you forcibly try to separate a pair of geminoids, you might rupture their sac-like body.  Their blood will spill out into the Void, and the two babies will blanch, weaken, and die. 

More likely, though, you'll just succeed in pulling the baby sideways.  It will volute in your hands, shrinking through a thousand stages of deformity in the second before vanishing.

Helpfuls

In my current ruleset, characters stop gaining HP at level 3.  From level 4 onward, they gain +1 Helpful every time they level up.

Level 1	HP = 1/3 of Con
Level 2	HP = 2/3 of Con
Level 3	HP = Con
Level 4+	+1 Helpful

Helpfuls are a renewable resource.  They replenish whenever the character gets a good night's sleep.

A player can spend Helpfuls to modify an ally's roll by an equal amount, up or down.  There is no limit to how many Helpfuls you can spend at once, and multiple people can contribute simultaneously.

The only caveat is that you must have a feasible way to affect their ally's action.

• The fighter feints, helping the wizard land a hit on the orc.
• The wizard shouts a warning, and the arrow meant for the warrior's throat hits him in the shoulder instead.
• The fighter reaches up with his shield, catching the arrow like an outfielder.
• The rogue sticks out his foot while the fighter shoves the zombie hog.

The fiction doesn't matter too much.  Let them be badasses.

Thieves

Thieves get an extra Helpful for every template.  Unlike other classes, Thieves can spend Helpfuls on themselves.

Discussion

GLOG characters don't really get much more powerful beyond level 3.  Instead, they get more versatile.  Helpfuls fit this philosophy well.

+1 Helpful is comparable to getting +1 HP (since you can use your Helpful to reduce incoming damage by 1 point).

They are similar to getting +1 HP at each level, since you can use Helpfuls to reduce incoming damage by an equal amount.  +1 HP is better at a single thing, while +1 Helpful is more versatile.

The biggest tweak over Luck Points (the previous incarnation) is that you can only use Helpfuls on other people, rather than yourself.  This has a few effects.

• It helps higher-level characters keep lower-level characters alive.
• It encourages players to stick together.  It hopefully fosters camaraderie, too, since players will be saving each other a lot.
• It works as insurance, insulating the player against a streak of bad luck.  If a lot of bad luck befalls one player, the other players can dump Helpfuls to keep them alive.
• It gives players something to do when its not their turn.  Hopefully, they'll be watching each other's rolls, looking for places where they can turn a miss into a hit.

I don't know if I want to put a cap on Helpfuls.  I've never had a game where players had more than a handful.

Trois Monstres

Shrifling

Named for the noise it makes.

One arm, one leg, one jaw, and one eye--it only needs one eye to see out of both sides of its paper-thin head.  If you reached out and touched it, it would squirm away, sharp hairs rushing under your fingers like the frayed rope connected to a falling boom.  The fibers are silky, but the tips are like knives.

Supposedly, they are born when rope kills its owner.

A competing theory maintains that they are cooperative colonies of tiny rockworms, akin to a migratory slime mold.  Everyone admits that this theory is less exciting, and therefor less likely to be true.

HD 4  (HP 1)  AC chain  Bite 1d12
Move horse  Climb spider  Int 6  Mor 10  Str 1

Threadlike -- Takes no fall damage.  Can creep along ceilings without falling.  Can leap through keyholes without slowing its gallop.  Looks like a thin strand of hair when it holds still.  Coiled up, a dead one barely fills your palm.


Confused by Hair -- Supposedly, it believe that the hair on a human's head is a baby.  It will attempt to 'rescue' the hair from a corpse, carry it to safety, and 'mourn' when it is unable to rouse the hair.

A shrifling I drew while waiting for the PCR to finish.

Barlutra

Giant carnivorous otters that hunt in packs.  Stats as wolves, except with a swim speed and a lower land speed.  They are sometimes hunted and harvested for a urine-like substance called lutreum, which is used in perfumes and fertility drugs.

They seem to show no fear of humans, and will occasionally prey on humans.  There is a tremendous amount of fear surrounding the barlutra, perhaps more than it deserves.

Superstitions:

1. Barlutra are drawn to pregnant women, who they seek to disembowel.
2. If a barlutra tail is waved over a sleeper, they will sicken.  Do every night for 7 days and they will die.
3. If a barlutra skull is buried beneath each room of a house, and the house is near a river, the house will be destroyed in a flood.
4. If a barlutra jumps over a corpse, the corpse will speak blasphemies until 3 am, damning the soul of the deceased.

When a pack of barlutra gets large enough, it will build a dam.  The dam forms a reservoir, and eventually multiple families of barlutra may take up residence around the reservoir.  Over a few years, they will dig and shape the reservoir until it is a perfect circle.

Then, the barlutra will contruct four false 'dams' at equidistant points around the circumference of this circular lake.  All dead creatures within the area will be raised as undead in service of the barlutra, who generally ignore the shambling, flopping things.

The rooms within their dams are lined with the skeletons of fish.  Animate, but waiting.  The corpses of their prey are often too scattered to recompose themselves, but those that can do so will drag themselves to the nearest 'dam' and incorporate themselves into the dam's structure.

Paladins and firebombs usually get involved long before this critical stage.  Still, barlutra in the remote parts of the world can remain undiscovered for generations, and the five towers of their reservoirs can grow to prodigious sizes.

Sidebar: Secret DM Knowledge

The reservoirs are summoning circles, waiting for someone with the knowledge to activate them.

Barlutra were corrupted long ago by Shadoom, in order to build his infernal infrastructure around Centerra.  Being beasts, they would never understand what they were building.  They would never betray him; they would never steal his secrets.  (Goblins were created for much the same reason.)

Whistlers and Hate Bees

Insects rip each other apart with a cruelty that is unfathomable to humans, but these depredations are impersonal.  In fact, the insect kingdoms are closely allied with one another.  They speak freely to each other, even as they tear the legs off one another.  They are united in their alien morality.

When the insect kingdoms become overcome with grief (when sorrow crushes them like a boot), they will mourn.  They do not weep nor pace.  Instead, all of the holometabolous insects in an area (except moths) come together and form a cocoon.

When a caterpillar forms a cocoon, the first thing that it does it to release enzymes that dissolve itself.  If you were to cut open a cocoon at the right time, a thick soup would dribble out.  The only parts of the caterpillar to survive are the soul discs, maintained by a webbing of nerves.  Safely encased in this nutrient soup, the insect regrows itself.  Unbound by its previous form, it is free to take any shape it wishes.

A grievous cocoon follows much of the same steps.  Each grievous cocoon is formed from hundreds of immature insects, and each cocoon is about the size of a soda can.

What emerges is a pair of insects, the whistler and the hate bee.

Sidebar: If the moth kingdoms were involved in the original meta-cocoon, the resulting creature will instead by a mothman.

Whistler

HD 2  AC chain  No Attacks
Fly bird  Int 10  Mor -

Whistlers are flying insects about the size of a fist.  They have heads on both ends of their pale bodies, but no mouths.  They do not need to eat.

They fly forwards like a hawk.  They fly backwards like a hummingbird.

When they find their target, they fly into the sky and detonate with a shrill noise.  This noise brings the hate bee.

Hate Bee

HD 2  AC chain  Sting
Fly bird  Int 2  Mor -

A hate bee is a large, black insect, about the size of your fist.  They are similar to bees, except that their stingers are nearly three inches long and extremely strong, being made from goethite nanofibers.  They usually secrete themselves inside hollow trees until they are summoned by a whistler.

The sting is instantly lethal (no save).  The victim's blood instantly blackens and turns to tar; their heart crushes itself to death.  The thickened blood can be harvested; from its distillation can a chemic harvest hatred.

The bee will continue to fly around, stinging madly.  It will kill as many people as it can.  Each time it stings, it takes 1d4 damage--it is not injecting poison, but its own rage and disgust.  And for a creature composed entirely of those emotions, this is a significant part of eternal soul.  A dead bee weighs half as much as a live bee (their souls are very heavy).

The calm emotions spell instantly kills a hate bee that fails its Save.

2d20 hours after the victim's death, their bones have weakened enough for the new caterpillar to crawl forth.  (The new caterpillar is formed from the brain and meninges of the newly deceased.)  The caterpillar will crawl to a quiet location (usually in the dead of the night) and weave a cocoon.

From the cocoon will spring several thousand insects.  Some large, most small.  Some impossible insects, some of the same mundane species that formed the original hate bee.  The impossible insects will include species that have gone extinct, some that have never existed, some that were born to kill more humans, and some that only want to crawl under a lot and suck tubers.  Many of them will have fragmented memories of the victim.

The stealthy nature of the caterpillar's exodus surprises many.  More than one adventuring party has been horrified to see the corpse of their ally split open in the morning, with the skull hollowed out and a slimy trail leading back into the infested forest that they just left.

Discussion

The hate bee is horrible, mostly because it will one-shot you regardless of your HP.  But players still have:

• an opportunity to kill the whistler before it whistles
• an opportunity to prepare/hide after the whistler whistles
• an opportunity to kill the hate bee before it stings
• an opportunity to save the stung person through the use of cold temperatures (casting cone of cold on their face) or calm emotions

Plus, its also possible to capture the whistler and use it against your own enemies.  All of this, taken together, makes the hate bee feel exploitable to be fun, and with enough opportunities for survival that I wouldn't feel evil throwing them at my players.

Also, if you are going to throw something like this at your players, be sure that they know that there are horrible insta-kill bees in the world before you throw insta-kill bees at them.  The one-armed guy in the tavern can tell them or--worst case scenario--just tell the fighter that he remembers fighting against these things in Abasinia, and what they can do.

By New York State Museum;University of the State of New York.