Hags

The Cannibal Coast: Part 3

First post is here and the second here. Enjoy.

yyy-xxx Sunfish

A strange grey-and-yellow disk floats in the sky, drifting around lazily as if a boat on the waves. From a distance it sure as fuck looks like a flying-saucer UFO. Luckily, this is just the Sunfish. It sweeps through the air like a eerily slow frisbee. It looks very meaty and heavy: this is just because it is full of helium sacs. It is 40' wide and has pallid grey skin with amber-yellow zebra-stripes. It blankly stares down at you with a big round eye.

If you talk to yourself while in the shadow of the Sunfish it plants thoughts in your head as if "filling in" the other side of the conversation. It is placid and helpful and has seen everything on the coast from a bird's eye view.
The sunfish's flesh bears alchemical properties of buoyancy and omniscience.
(AC 8, HD 10, hp 40, #AT 0, D 0, ML 5)

yyy-xxx Censer Forest

A forest of willow trees with wide, low canopies of grey-black leaves. Strange fruit hangs here and there on long swinging stems. These are censer-fruit. They resemble pomegranates. When shaken by the wind they release bioluminescent dust like a puffball mushroom, together filling the air for a dozen miles around with gentle yellow sparkling light. If carefully harvested and dried out they can serve as "flash-bang" grenades (takes an hour to harvest d6).

yyy-xxx Grasshopper Fighters

Dozens of stakes dot the grasslands. Each is topped with a distorted bit of bone: a human jaw that looks as if it has "melted" upwards.

Between two bamboo-covered hills lies an old ruin. All that is left is a pounded-earth foundation and crumbled stone walls, each brick engraved with a square-spiral pattern. The building, squat and narrow, like a stable, is roofed with an over-under-woven lattice-tarp that also serves as a huge rain-catcher. There is no fire-smoke: the Grasshopper Fighters wouldn't draw attention to themselves like that.

4d6 reclusive survivors live here. They are Shalkin escapees, once engineered to be a skirmisher-soldier-caste but now free after they jumped from a cigar-shaped flying-transport-ship. Someone unfamiliar would call them "Insect-Men" or "Cricket-Centaurs". Their chests are mottled with scabby skin, their abdomens are bulbous and covered in prickly hair, and their swollen digitigrade legs spasm violently like a pair of salted-frog-legs. They each stand ten feet tall and wear their hair long, which often reaches down to their waists. They can leap thirty feet from standing, their legs clapping like a gunshot when they do. They fight with bamboo javelins.
(AC 7, HD 2, hp 7, #AT 1, D 1-8, ML 7)

The group is guided by Mkdir, a sallow-faced, black-haired Priest of the Curved Horn: he staves off despair by framing their abduction and horrific torture as a chance for rebirth.

yyy-xxx The Count Lamoral de Marcillac

The glint of some metal statue on the horizon, and soon after the sound of a cutlery draw being rattled. The Count Lamoral de Marcillac stumbles about in his trusty plate-armour, slung with a bizarre collection of hunting trophies. He's lost his helmet and gazes around wildly through cracked eye-glasses, his long and frazzled blonde hair tied back to expose a crumpled-leather forrid that would be quite handsome if not wracked by stress and sunburn. He has a stained green cravat spilling from his gorget that matches the flaking heraldry on his plackart: Vert a pale wavy azure, a sun proper. The Count very much has the look of aristocracy around him: obnoxious, high-upkeep, and rapidly in decline.

The last thing Marcillac remembers of his previous life in "The Fair and Fine Kingdom of Kest, or Ceanne" is falling from his horse after an abortive raid on a quaint mountainside hamlet in "Western Brecht". Ever since he has wandered the Antarctic Wastes (assuredly "Upper Duchovny") in what he presumes to be a lucid dream. He has done much hunting in this wondrous realm: four saiga, a dozen otter-goblins ("Moulayan Gremlins"), and somehow a sabre-tooth-lion. His flamberge is stained with gore. He's been here for three days. He needs some water.

The Count's happy to join a larger hunting party and experience the thrills of the Duchovny Dreamlands circa the late thirteen century. The only way to convince him this isn't a dream is to point out that he's probably slept while here and dreamt entirely separate dreams: this sparks some kind of sobering logic in Marcillac that sends him into manic-depression for d6 days before his soul is forged anew. He is a 4HD Fighter.

yyy-xxx The Shrouded Shambler

A pale beige blob is splayed out on the shingle-covered slope of a hill. It looks like a beached whale or a leathery collapsed tent. Locals recognise it. It's the Shrouded Shambler! Stay quiet, and Run!

This is a "Shalkin Sweeper": a bio-engineered organic-matter-collector. It resembles a 15' wide starfish with muscular knobbly flesh. At the beast's centre is a miniature bio-powered black hole linked to a deposit-pit onboard a distant Shalkin Airborne Research Facility. None of this can be seen though: the creature is fitted with a thick mottled sheet of flesh, somewhat like an opaque caul. Only the tips of the Shambler's feet can be seen poking from underneath the sheet. It is blind yet possesses an amazing sense of hearing (as well as 30' of tremor-sense). It bludgeons prey to death before embracing and sucking away their remains.

The Black Hole Implant can be extracted if the Shambler is killed. It resembles a big electrode cap. It requires nutrients and a blood supply to operate.
(AC 8, HD 8, hp 35, #AT 2, D 1-6, ML 11)

yyy-xxx Giant's Cart

In a gulley at the side of the raised road-way lies an upturned giant cart. Big round wheels are fitted to a body of big planks. The wood is old and weathered but not rotted. It was presumably once fitted to a giant horse.
Spilling from the cart are four giant barrels. Only the faintest impression of a brewer's painted crest remains: a fish-scale texture is all that can be made out. The beer is gone.

This is a Giant's Cart carrying Giant Barrels of Giant Beer for a Giant's Pub. Each item is three times larger than normal.

yyy-xxx A Drop of Honey

A certain man used to hunt the wild beasts in the desert, and one day he came upon an old and ruined hamlet in the mountains, where he found a woman of great age who offered him honey from the hives in her cottage's fruit trees. So he took some thereof in a water-skin he had with him and throwing it over his shoulder, carried it to the city, followed by a hunting dog which was dear to him. He stopped at the shop of an oilman and offered him the honey for sale and he bought it. Then he emptied it out of the skin that he might see it, and in the act a drop fell to the ground, whereupon the flies flocked to it and a bird swooped down upon the flies. Now the oilman had a cat, which pounced upon the bird, and the huntsman’s dog, seeing the cat, sprang upon it and killed it; whereupon the oilman ran at the dog and killed it and the huntsman in turn leapt upon the oilman and killed him. Now the oilman was of one quarter and the huntsman of another; and when the people of the two places heard what had passed, they took up arms and rose on one another in anger, and there befell a sore battle; nor did the sword leave to play amongst them, till there died of them much people, none knoweth their number save God the Most High. - (The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night; Payne, 1882)

Thus was the City of Maddoks reduced to a grand pile of rubble. Yet! The crumbled stone and cracked masonry and shattered roof-tiles still buzz with life. Bees flitter betwixt blooming wildflowers and overgrown olive-fields and burgeoning fruit-trees and long-untended herb-gardens.
At the centre, in the shadow of the Ruins of the Grand Palace, a little lean-to has been built against an old and rusty throne. Within lives Old Ansa, a quiet and kind hermit-woman, wide of stature with leathery skin and a wart on the side of her nose. She was obviously once very pretty. She tends to the flowering fruit-trees in the old Palace Gardens. Many beehives thrive here. She offers travellers some honey but has nothing for them to carry it in.

yyy-xxx The Rubicund Ram

The wool on this ram’s back, sir, it grew so very high,
The eagles came and built their nests and I heard the young ’uns cry.
- The Derby Ram

A big mass of red on the horizon: some grand ruminant stripping entire pine-trees bare with a single pull of the teeth. The beast is perhaps thirty feet high with a thick and shaggy coat of maroon and carmine and vermillion and scarlet that reaches down to the ground. It is full of debris. On the ram's head rest two curved horns of rust-red brass, each big enough for a man to sit inside if they were hollow.

This acersecomic ungulate is a wonder to behold. All manner of airborne pests and otherwise appear to have nested on the Ram's back. Crows and doves and gulls swoop around. Even a wasp-nest appears to hang from the underside of one leg! What a delight!

The Rubicund Ram is very relaxed but can becomes quite rambunctious if riled (AC 5, HD 8, hp 35, #AT 1, D 2-20, ML 12). The birds act as a harrying force. The Ram's blood possesses alchemical properties of size-changing and fertility. The Ram's wool possesses magical powers of animal-friendship and truth-telling. The Ram's horns are inhabited by spirits of fire.

yyy-xxx Spectral Shield

An unusual shimmering sheet drifts along. It is drawn by the air-currents but far slower than it should be, in the manner of a piece of plastic underwater. The checker-board fabric is almost translucent, like a snakeskin, or a jellyfish. It can be chased down. The material is 2' square (a "fat quarter") and seemingly weightless yet totally indestructible.

If draped over oneself while unfolded the shroud sublimates into the flesh, granting a slight iridescent shimmer and total immunity to all 1st Level spells. During sleep it separates from hosts but is likely to be caught by bedclothes or blankets. It can be reapplied.

This is the lost neckerchief of a Prince from the Stars.

Spectral Shield

yyy-xxx The Ivory Asp

This reach of the Pine Barrens is inhabited by a Beast Most Dire.

A hooded serpent slithers along, but six feet in length and no fatter than a child's wrist. It is clad with milky albino scales. It is beautiful. It is the Ivory Asp. Princes hunt for it. Mothers scare their children with it. Poets sing of it. It is an ordinary cobra.

If one has heard the tales of the Ivory Asp, of the serpent's unmistakeable grace and glamour, of the lethal venom that drips from the White Devil's fangs, then they are in much danger. The Ivory Asp's toxin poses a threat only to those who believe in it. If one has, and they are bitten, then the poor victim is overcome with a terrible sense of impending doom for one minute, begins violently coughing up blood for another, then drops dead.

d6 doses can be extracted from the Asp's fangs each month if kept alive. 2d6 doses can be extracted at once if it's slain. (AC 3, HD 1, hp 3, #AT 1, D 0 + memeto-venom, ML 6)

yyy-xxx Simoom Beast

A tinny little chime on the horizon, like a little lamb's cowbell, and then a sudden onslaught of wind. Panic! Fret! Run for Shelter! The Simoom Beast is upon us!

First, a hot and dry wind singes any bare skin. Then, the victims are gnat-bit by hundreds of tiny airborne grains of dirt and grit. Finally, the debris is whipped up into an impenetrable screen and travellers are spun around (if one hasn't identified any landmarks then you're out of luck). Then, with another ring of the chime, the wind departs as quickly as it came.

The Simoom isn't too dangerous unless one is of a particularly fragile nature. It is hugely exaggerated by guides and outdoorsmen of the area looking to impress women or drum up business.

It's all caused by a tiny grey tern (a little seabird with a distinctive black "hat" colouration). It clutches a little golden bell in an orange beak and rings it with mischievous glee. 2-in-6 chance of spotting it before-hand, 1-in-6 during, and 5-in-6 as it flutters away. If you catch it and take the bell then you too can summon mildly unpleasant winds at will.

yyy-xxx Mistress of the Hills

From a high and rocky promontory a huge eagle watches. Or is it a lion? It's difficult to tell from here. Don't worry: she soon swoops down to introduce herself.

The Mistress of the Hills is brown in tone, with the elegant dappled-tan plumage of an eagle. She has beautiful stripes of deep azure on her lion-foot-talons and bushy tail. Her face is covered by a featureless mask of pearl decorated with rings of azure. She tilts her head as she speaks in a strangely high and gentle voice.

She tries to be friendly. She asks the group to introduce themselves. She asks who the Strongest is. She asks who the Quickest is. She asks who the Wisest is. She proposes a game to the Wisest: she will try to guess their intentions and give them a treasure of their choice if they succeed.

The Mistress explains the game as she produces a jewelled bottle of shimmering blue poison. The player is to drink the poison the next day at the sun's highest point. The Sphinx will return beforehand, at daybreak, to give the player their prize if they truly intend to drink it. The Sphinx will not return if the player doesn't plan to drink it.
If asked the Sphinx happily states she uses no future-sight or scrying or spying. After the player accepts, she leaves and returns to her promontory, waiting, watching.

*GMs, this is a really fun way to throw your players for a mind-melter. You have to be the judge of their characters' intentions. She will almost always return. She only snubs the players if they try and get really tricky. This isn't the tricky part. The brain-destroyer is when she gives you the three options for a prize.

The Mistress's offerings, only revealed if she does return, are as thus:

Serra Sphinx

yyy-xxx Fire Beetle Hive

Blackened spires shudder in the wind. This reach of the pine barren is freshly burned. It is home to 5d6 Fire Beetles. These wondrous insects are each the size of a sheep. Feelers and stumpy legs poke out from under a gently glowing dome of iridescent brass. At the end of each antennae is a little thimble-bowl, from which sprouts a body-fat-fed candle flame. The beetles creak and groan.
(AC 5, HD 1+1, hp 5, #AT 1, D 1-6, ML 9)

These creatures are nature's solution to an ecosystem that requires regular wild-fires yet is far too cold. The beetles don't want any trouble. They're currently just constructing a hive from the ash. It resembles a huge stuck-together mass of giant burnt marshmallows, 20' wide and tall. Fire beetle blood possesses alchemical properties of fire and adhesiveness. Their shells are brittle but highly fire resistant.

yyy-xxx Singing Trees

The air is hot and thin and dry as it rushes past you. This reach of the pine barren is still smouldering, the trees like charcoal'd sticks of swiss-cheese. Glowing embers rattle in the undergrowth.

Terrible screams echo out betwixt the ashen trunks. It sounds like someone running for their life. Howling to try and attract any help. There is no trace of the poor soul.

The screams are naught but a natural illusion, the sound of wind whistling through burrowed holes in the trees. The cries become more intense as the wind does: pursing your lips and blowing through one sounds like bloody murder.
The tricksy Pockhole Worm can rapidly burrow these strange tunnels through almost any organic material, even rock. They resemble tiger-striped grubs the size of a fat man's thumb. They feed on detritus. One can take two hours to scavenge for d6-1 specimens. Why would you though? These are nasty little pests that can really lower property values.