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Poll #331 - Starbases & Hives: Adventures for Starfinder
🕑 Added 2023-05-03 03:10:02 +0000 UTCHey all!
A bit of a spoiler, but we'll be making content for Paizo's Starfinder soon. The content we're going to create will be very similar to the Dungeons & Lairs series, focusing on a single creature in the Starfinder universe in its ideal habitat.
Below, I've listed 20 monsters to kick off the series. I'm starting off with monsters for arctic worlds.
Pick the three that you like best. The five that get the most votes will be made into Starfinder adventures first.
Since these are all new creatures to many of us, here are their descriptions:
Akata: The akata are about the size and proportions of a lion, except instead of manes they boast a collection of tendrils encircling their neck. Their flesh is rubbery and quite unlike normal flesh. They weigh around 400 pounds. The most unnerving thing about their appearance is their complete and utter silence. They make no sound when they move, no roars or braying, even as they close in to tear prey limb from limb. Akatas have no lung or vocal cords and so are unable to make any sound
Arabuk: All arabuks have a set of large antlers, curved symmetrically in a crown above their heads. Their patterned, leopard-like bodies assist them in blending in with the rugged tundra. When hunting, the creatures’ padded and clawed front feet allow them to evenly spread their weight as they traverse precarious snowbanks. Arabuks can also leap great distances and balance on the jagged edges of mountains with their sturdy and powerful hoofed back legs.
Bloodbrother: Measuring over 15 feet tall and 11 feet long, a bloodbrother looks like a millipede or some other armored, wormlike arthropod from the waist down. Its upper half resembles that of a muscular humanoid with a set of bony appendages protruding from a cavity in its chest. This ersatz rib cage can open like a fanged mouth, and when a bloodbrother places captured prey within it, the bones clamp down on the creature while the walls of the enclosure exude thin tendrilous suckers. These suckers tap into the prey’s circulatory system. Rather than simply drinking its blood, though, the bloodbrother uses the trapped creature as an auxiliary heart, absorbing blood-borne nutrients and using the prey’s metabolism to help it heat and feed itself. Prey can be kept alive in this way for months, until all its stored energy has been used up and the bloodbrother lets the lifeless husk fall to the ground.
Deh-nola: Deh-nolos have bulbous bodies held up by four spindly legs, and four translucent sacs at the end of appendages growing from their backs. Venomous glands grow in patches across the deh-nolo's body; this poison can be applied to the projectiles they launch or exposed to attackers that rupture these glands. A typical deh-nolo stands almost 20 feet tall on its four spindly legs and weighs close to 2000 pounds.
Diaspora worm: These predators resemble immense, fanged eels. Younger wyrms are sleek and sinuous, while older ones bear fringes of calcium-based scales. Instead of eyes, a wyrm has frills sensitive to electromagnetic fields. Organs in the wyrm’s head allow it to shape its field, producing waves that allow communication.
Flayer leech: A flayer leech is a tiny invertebrate with a semitranslucent body and what appears to be a head that tapers to a point. This head is actually a segmented mouth that unfolds into five petal-like jaws, each lined with row upon row of curved, barbed teeth. Lodged deep within the flayer leech’s throat is a retractable proboscis that, when extended, vibrates at an ultrasonic frequency high enough that it can pierce a creature’s bones, siphoning the marrow inside. This appendage is surrounded by a pair of spinnerets that produce a durable material that is essential to a flayer leech’s life cycle. A flayer leech is approximately 1 foot long and weighs only a few pounds. A flayer leech is a mindless, opportunistic predator that preys on all living creatures, but when it kills a humanoid or monstrous humanoid, it can wear the skin of its victim like a suit of clothes after a process of metamorphosis.
Ghoul: In ages past, ghouls shunned society and haunted cemeteries and city sewers. However, ghouls are more likely to live in cities, especially settlements inhabited primarily by undead. Ghouls are resourceful and hardy, and make good workers across a variety of industries. Their adaptability is striking even for undead creatures, and ghouls who are patient and dedicated can become excellent researchers, scholars, soldiers, laborers, and more. Ghouls of all proficiencies and backgrounds are especially populous on undead planets. Ghouls spread—sometimes purposefully—a virulent disease known as ghoul fever through their saliva. As creatures that die of ghoul fever often rise as ghouls themselves, a population explosion can easily result. However, even in ghoul society, it is frowned upon to inflict ghoul fever on large numbers of living creatures. Such behavior leads to unwanted attention from authorities.
Glass serpent: The terrifying ambush predators known as glass serpents are some of the most notorious beasts to roam blasted wastelands, preying on local fauna and unwary undead alike. Similar creatures have been found on dozens of planets, leading scholars to speculate that glass serpents may have been brought through magical means, or that they may represent a natural case of parallel evolution on worlds that have suffered massive catastrophes. Glass serpents have long, undulating bodies that bulge and narrow at regular intervals, giving them a shape almost like a chain of thick links. Their heads are much different from those of traditional snakes, with a row of eyes peering out from beneath an armored, helmetlike crest, and long feeding tentacles each tipped with a glowing, crystalline tooth dangling from their mouths. Yet, the most fearsome aspect of glass serpents must be their legendary scales: smooth crystalline structures that warp and wrap light around the serpents, turning them invisible and making them terrifying combatants. This invisibility isn’t entirely voluntary and requires enough energy from a serpent that it can activate the ability only when it is hungry and hunting. When well fed, the serpent becomes visible once more, its body appearing partially translucent and strewn with shimmering rainbows.
Hobkins gremlin: This small, blue-gray humanoid has glowing eyes and huge ears on its round, oversized head. Like many gremlins, hobkins enjoy destroying things that others cherish, but unlike their jinkin cousins, hobkins delight in manipulating people into destroying their own belongings. Their favorite strategy is to use their spell-like abilities and their Intimidate skill to frighten a family. A hobkins may wait at a child’s window during a storm so that it appears pressed up against the glass when the lightning flashes, only to hide away when they check again. Once its victims work themselves into a frenzy, the gremlin gives them time to arm themselves, then reveals itself, leaping and floating out of reach to force panicked victims to throw anything at hand. A hobkins stands 3 feet tall and weighs 15 pounds.
Hallajin: Spacefaring legends from ancient times describe the “lights of Hallas,” strange glowing forms seen on the moon Hallas beneath the stormy shadow of Liavara the Dreamer. Most of the time, these shapes look like shifting multicolored masses of light, though sometimes hints of feathery wings, scaly coils, staring eyes, or writhing tendrils emerge from within their depths. These forms were initially believed to be just strange lights seen in the sky of Hallas, perhaps an aurora or a type of ball lightning related to the storms of Liavara, but visitors to the moon quickly learned they were intelligent—if inscrutable—creatures, though that knowledge came at a high price. The creatures are able to communicate telepathically, but when the first emissaries from nearby Arkanen attempted to contact them in the same manner, the experience seared the emissaries’ minds. This led to the establishment of a powerful magical cordon around the world—one that remains in place to this day, now administrated by Pact Worlds officials on nearby Arkanen to ensure unprepared visitors don’t accidentally destroy their minds or anger the powerful entities.
Kyokor: Kyokors are enormous juggernauts covered in shell-like exoskeletons of armored plates, from between which they can extrude hundreds of wriggling tonguelike appendages. They have occasionally been observed using these grotesque tendrils in those rare situations in which they need fine manipulation ability (though they may have others uses as well). Certainly the jagged crablike claws on their arms are useless for grabbing anything smaller than a boulder; these are used almost exclusively to spear and smash. A kyokor has an armored skull with a strangely elongated chin, tiny glowing eyes peeking out from a cavernous gash, and sharp growths like a crown of teeth rising from the top of its head. A single kyokor is typically about 150 feet tall and weighs more than 20,000 tons.
Marooned one: Whether they died of asphyxiation, dehydration, or starvation, unfortunate souls that arise as marooned ones have a desiccated look, with taut skin stretched across their bones. Depending on how long it took them to die, they may have patched environment suits or other signs of their attempts to prolong their isolated lives as long as possible. Many show evidence of madness, both from the psychological pain of their abandonment and from the supernatural dread of the horrific transformation that awaits them just on the other side of death. They often have elaborate tattoos or ritual scarification—marks to count each day of their abandonment are common—or signs of dramatic self-harm, sometimes even including obvious signs of suicide from last-ditch efforts to end their loneliness or avoid the undead eternities that await them. Regardless of their mortal forms or alterations thereto, all marooned ones are distinguishable from similar undead by their glowing, ice-blue eyes and mouths that open unnaturally wide in cheek-splitting and jaw-cracking screams of fury.
Niaq: Shaped like a pterodactyl, a niaq is white with a network of black-blooded veins that extend across its body. Instead of eyes, the creature has a mane of cilia that sense minute variations in temperature, allowing it to distinguish heat signatures of prey and the nearby topography. For a mouth, the creature has a feeding lance, which is a tight cylinder of long, hollow quills. Each of a niaq’s wings has a fringe of similar but shorter quills that the creature can launch as projectiles with a flick of a wing.
Scavenger Slime: Scavenger slimes are lumps of protoplasm measuring about 6 feet across. Though mindless, they have an intuitive understanding of order and technological systems, allowing them to patch or repair nearly anything they encounter, though rarely into a form as reliable or attractive as it may have once been. Actually using these items is often beyond them— an ooze might rebuild a hovercar, but have no idea how to operate it, unable to even grasp its purpose. Similarly, an ooze might repair a datapad, yet have no concept what the sights and sounds it displays are attempting to communicate. The sole exception to this principle is weapons: through whatever mechanism, scavenger slimes long ago gained the ability to direct and trigger the weapons they rebuild, instinctively understanding what they’re for and how to use them in their own defense, treating them like specially adapted limbs.
Shantak: Shantaks are bizarre, winged creatures that seem to be an incongruous blend of reptile and bird. Although shantaks appear ungainly on land when perched on their two legs, their vast, bat-like wings enable the creatures to soar gracefully through vacuum as easily as they fly in atmospheres. Slimy scales cover a shantak’s body, and its vaguely horselike head features a wide maw filled with dagger-like teeth. A shantak is about 30 feet long from nose to tail and weighs approximately 6,000 pounds. Planetside, shantaks inhabit remote and foreboding mountain peaks, but their ability to survive in and fly through vacuum means they can also be found in the void of space.
Sharpwing: Sharpwings are fierce and fast carnivores found mainly in and soaring between the Ice Wells of Aballon—deep craters filled with a surprising variety of biological life that most people wouldn’t associate with the predominantly machine-occupied planet. Those who encroach on sharpwing territory know that the only way to survive an encounter with the deadly predator is to bring it down before it draws close enough to attack with its devastating talons. Even such an undertaking is fraught with risk, as the creatures slice through the sky at such speeds that few have a chance of firing more than once or twice before the creature’s razor claws descend. Sneaking up on a sharpwing is next to impossible thanks to the sensors covering its sleek body and wings, and while the beast is flying, it almost always sees its prey long before the prey is aware of its presence.
Stormghost: Each of these rarely encountered hunters has a muscular humanoid torso and stands nearly 8 feet tall on four jagged insectile legs. Tiny eyes ring a stormghost’s conical head, which also bears a toothy mouth. Built of muscled flesh and hardened chitin, a stormghost weighs roughly 1,500 pounds.
Thorgothrel: The aggressive and insightful genetic manipulators known as thorgothrels enforce their vision of retrogressive development on other species. Once an enlightened humanoid society with impressive technological advancements, the thorgothrels fell under the sway of philosophers and zealots who believed that evolution into higher-ordered forms posed a danger to the universe. The thorgothrels thus began millennia-long self-experimentation to revert themselves to simple, protoplasmic forms while retaining their keen intelligence.
Ursikka: These enormous, nightmarish praying mantises stretch 20 feet in length and stand as tall as 25 feet—mostly due to the long, slender walking legs on which they skitter with an eerie speed. Ursikkas’ grasping forelimbs each end in sharp pincers capable of shearing flesh from bone, and their three-part maws can open wide enough to swallow humans whole. Freezing saliva drips from their gnashing mandibles, which can injure and trap prey.
Wolliped: Wollipeds are eight-legged mammals with a thick fleece and long tusks.
Comments
Joseph Browne
Fantastic new's, great to have more scifi content
