Thursday, March 12, 2015

Numenera Bestiary, A's and B's

I like the Numenera Bestiary but I wouldn't use any of the monsters as-is in my weird fantasy ocean d&d marilith game so I'm messing with them.

Accelerator: so when you petrify and animate a drider, and saw off its body and replace it with a dead psychic child embalmed and encased in nearly opaque black crystal, it becomes an accelerator.

Astraphin monolith: Not the plant thing, and not lasers either. Pluck out a wizard’s eye. Pour lava over the wizard and let it harden. Preserve the eye and set it into the elaborately carved pumice statue. The powers just happen when the eye can see you: your flesh corrodes, you catch fire, etc.

Avatrol. Instead of a camel, it’s an evil horse with a hole through its head - just a smooth bore so you can see its bone, flesh, brain, etc.

Balikna: Come on . . . it's a spiky lizard and it turns invisible and its blind but can hear really good so that doesn't matter and it has lobster claws and a club tail and oh man.  Even the name sounds like made-up Czech for "dear grandmother."  So this is now a normal-sized incredibly magical "common quail" that's invisible in sunlight and moonlight, and it's poisonous to touch (which numbs and paralyses what touches it) and a poisonous spur that knocks its opponent out. It hungers for brains.



There really is a bird that's poisonous to the touch in that way. It's called the hooded pitohui, which is a better word than "balikna." I'll call this the shaded nightquail.

Bellowheart: This is a great picture. I've decided it's a mutant giant, so it still speaks giant. Its powers are good - I'd use this almost as-is.

Blitzer: Also serviceable almost without modification. Now they have a tiny demon embedded in their organs that glows and tortures them, so if you can kill or extract the demon without killing the blitzer, they recover. Also if the blitzer overheats it explodes like a fireball and the fire demon crawls out and burns a tiny smoking hole through reality to get back to hell.

Bloodfeast tick: It sucks on a sleeping person until they die, and then it's inflated by the blood and is a giant tick. No way. Now it's the bloodbaby: you inject them under your skin and it feeds on your blood until you have a little baby growing on you that you can pamper and feed other people's blood, and some people let it get so big that it's huge and bloated and crawls around dragging them around behind it all emaciated and dessicated. So the players can meet a lavishly dressed rich-person attached by their skin to a gigantic crying hungry baby. They're malicious and stupid but their "parent" overlooks this.

More later.

No comments:

Post a Comment