Goblin Punch Book of Tigers
Goblin Punch Book of Tigers
Goblin Punch Book of Tigers
Book
of
Tigers
by Arnold Kemp
Version 1.1
http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com
November 2013
Since humans have transcended their ecology, instinctual fears (darkness, tigers) have
become increasingly irrelevant. Big predators simply couldn't keep up with our rapid
development of communities, communication, and symbolic intelligence.
Tigers are one of the original predators of humanity. But despite killing 373,000
people between 1800 and 2009, tigers don't evoke the same fear and helplessness that
they did a few hundred thousand years ago.
With only a few thousand years to work with, the modern tiger hasn't had time to
evolve. But perhaps imagination can do what natural selection cannot, and in that
hope, I humbly submit these ten beasties.
It is well known that tigers can curse their killers. A tiger's curse is inflicted when
the tiger's death was in defiance of the natural order: when prey has killed the
predator.
The tigers of the Frogwash give the Curse of Slow Numbers. The tigers of Basharna
cause their killers to become infertile. And the "tigers" of the Yalte Highlands merely
give you fleas. But it is the tigers of Abasinia that bestow the Curse of the Cat 's
Shadow with their last breaths, and this is the most dreaded.
Once cursed, your shadow disappears. It has turned into a tiger, and it will stalk you
over the next seven days. Sometime after that, it will kill you.
Rakshasas and their servants seem to be able to cast this curse freely, as a spell.
Clerics and churches may be able to delay or even remove the tiger curse, but this is
not certain.
These tigers revel in your fear, and will not attack once they sense that the dread has
built up to a crescendo. Powerful creatures have less to fear from tigers, and so the
tiger may never materialize until the creature is old and feeble. But even dragons
cannot hunt many tigers with impunity. The tigers accumulate within the stolen
shadow, and eventually that dragon will wake up in the cool dampness up his cave
and realize that it is filled with tigers.
Shadow tigers have the same stats as normal tigers, except they only leave footprints
on stone and can travel through other shadows. The cursed person must be the one
that ultimately slays his shadow's tiger—if anyone else kills the tiger shade, the curse
is not lifted but rather transferred to the new slayer.
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Flying Gullets
Because they depend on being recognized, they only hunt certain visually-oriented
herbivores, predators, and humans. Cows and chickens are safe, since they are too big
and too stupid respectively, but pigs are common prey. They lurk at crossroads and
frontier-towns. When they get very hungry, they fly into cities, terrify children,
hide in attics, and begin a campaign of methodical carnivory.
When they hunt, they float right up behind you, quiet as a strangled dove, and
inhale you. It's like being sucked out of an airplane. Then it flies off.
SARCOSYRINX
HD 3
AC 9 [10]
Atk +3 to swallow whole
Move fly 12
Save 14
Morale 8
Special pseudo-invisibility
Swallow Whole : It literally inhales you. You take 1d4 damage per round in the
stomach, and fall unconscious in 3 rounds. You can stab the creature from the inside
with a small weapon, and you can climb out when the creature dies.
Pseudo-invisibility : If you've never even heard of the sarcosyrinx before, the first
one you see will slowly fade to invisibility over the course of three rounds. If you
have heard of them before, it will fade out over the course of one round. And if
you've seen a sarcosyrinx even once before, they're all invisible to you.
2
The Hungry Sky
CUMULONICTUS
HD 12
AC 9 [10]
Atk +8 to grab (and lifted 20'/round)
Atk +8 bite (2d8 damage, only usable at mouth)
Move fly 6 (unless blown by wind)
Save 10
Morale 9
Special invisible tentacles
3
The Names of the Worm
Of the Names of the Worm there are nine. These names are filled with strange
vowels, glottal stops, and inhuman elisions. No one can hear one of Names of the
Worm without immediately recognizing it as alien and dangerous.
Once you've heard a Name of the Worm, you will never forget it. You will want to
speak it aloud, but this is not a magical compulsion. It is a word of power, and even
the meanest peasant will want to know what it sounds like from their own lips.
Even if they know of the danger, the curiosity will not lesson. It will lurk in your
mind for years, decades. And if old age and dementia claim you, the Name of the
Worm will be the last thing you ever forget.
It will tumble from your lips while you are asleep. You will cry it in error while in
the throes of passion. Those who know a Name and its danger would be wise to
take precautions against these events.
Once you have spoken the Name of the Worm, a very literal worm will begin to
grow inside your skull. This causes headaches, amnesia, and eventually hallucinations.
Once the worm reaches maturity inside your head, you will be compelled to say the
Name of the Worm again, and the worm will slither out of your left ear, growing to
maturity in the process. At their adult size, they are over 8 ' long. These
otherworldly creatures have been given the trite appellation of "Fangolian Ear
Worms".
You will be reduced to a madman, capable of only saying the names of people and
objects. You will be compelled to tell people the story of the Name and the the
Name itself, but you can never stop yourself from recoiling in horror if the name is
said in your presence.
The worms are not gods or spirits or demons, although many people believe them to
be these things. Most believe that they are all that remain of our Original Foe,
who was defeated so long ago that nothing else is known.
A few scholars believe that the inverse is true: that the Names of the Worm were
given to protect us, but that the erosion of eons have obscured their original usage so
much that they seem to be only a curse.
Whatever the case, the worms that emerge from our heads are simple beasts. They
crawl, hide, hunt, and die. When distressed, they say the name of their "parent ".
When killed, they say their own name. Scholars tell us that these worms are merely
the juvenile forms of something else, but are perpetually stunted by their lack of
something.
Out of consideration for the reader, I will not print the Names here.
4
FANGOLIAN EAR WORM
HD 4
AC 5 [14]
Atk +5 bite (2d6 damage + poison)
Move 9
Save 14
Morale 10
Special babble, poison
Poison: With a failed save, poison from the worms bite causes paralysis for 1d6
rounds. Additionally, for the next 2d6 days, anything the person attempts to say is
reduced to gibberish. They also run a slight fever during this time.
Elder Worms have grown to tremendous sizes over the course of a century. Treat
them as 12 HD purple worms, but with appropriate special abilities. They develop
near-human levels of intelligence, and sometimes rule over colonies of madmen. They
protect these colonies, and dwell nearby or beneath in secret caves with their
"grandchildren" worms and adoring worshippers.
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The Importance of Being Vulgar
These predators are deadly in cities (especially elven ones), where there are more
taboos regarding defecation and parasites. Since these things are disgusting, they are
frequently ignored and rarely revealed to others. Many "sophisticated " people would
simply replace their missing cats than go through the messy, disgusting, painful, and
potentially lethal process of extracting the worm. Why risk dying in your own shit?
Dwarves rarely suffer from Bolgen Worms, since their binge drinking usually kills the
worm. The levels of alcohol required are usually fatal to other creatures.
Occasionally, an angry Bolgen Worm will emerge from a dead creature. Some truly
huge specimens have been recorded slithering out from slain dragons.
These stats are for a small-to-medium worm. In combat, it usually opens by spitting
acid and slowly retreating, switching to bites when engaged in melee.
BOLGEN WORM
HD 4
AC 8 [11]
Atk +4 bite (1d6 damage + 50% to deposit egg)
Atk +4 acid spit (1d6 damage each round until wiped/rinsed off, 30' range)
Move 9
Save 16
Morale 9
Special strong alcohol damages it (like holy water damages undead)
6
Weeping and Raging, Hissing and Hushed
You will rarely see a Beast of Four Sorrows outside of a city. The formation of one
requires exactly four people. These four people must be in a highly emotional state,
with a large degree of psychic resonance (both constructive and deconstructive)
between them. One must be angry, one must be terrified, one must be heartbroken,
and one must be dead.
When situation arises, there is a chance that the four people may explode and
recombine. This process fuses them together, but it also incorporated pieces of their
environment, usually furniture, tableware, broken glass, and metal shards.
The Beast of Four Sorrows is huge and quadrupedal. Everything else about its form
is highly variable, and depends on the people, environment, and circumstances of it 's
birth. Once created, the Beast of Four Sorrows will seek to kill another four people
in four different ways. Once that has been performed, the Beast will hide itself.
It may climb down into a basement, sink down into a cave, or shamble into a remote
thicket. Once alone, the creature will talk to itself, raging, babbling, and weeping.
These four souls will suffer thus until it is destroyed.
Psychic Attack: Instead of attacking, the Beast may instead cry out. Roll a d4:
1 – Anger. Creatures in 60' must save or attack a creature each round for 2d6 rounds.
2 – Fear. Creatures in 60' must save or flee in terror for 2d6 rounds.
3 – Sadness. Creatures in 60' must save or get -4 to all d20 rolls for 1 round.
4 – Death. Creatures in 60' must save or take 6d6 damage. Any damage taken from
this ability is healed one round later (and any resultant deaths are transient).
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Soft and Forgotten
These creatures resemble what you would get if you stretched out a dog into the
proportions of a horse, changed its flesh to a flabby white substance, and gave it a
ring of tentacles around the mouth. The touch of these tentacles feels like a caress
from woman's hand, soft and highly powdered. It's eyes are candy blue,
phosphorescent, and eerily soothing when calm. Its body feels powdery (it isn 't) and
infinitely soft. This is the Alabaster Hound of Yog, sometimes called the amnesia
beast.
As soon as it vanishes from your sight, it vanishes from your memory. In fact, all
memories leading up to your encounter with the beast are forgotten (although it
effects elves differently: see below). In combat, the beast will usually attempt to kill
the weakest party member and run off with them, leaving its foes confused and
ineffective.
Many a party has suddenly found themselves on the bottom floor of a dungeon
without any memories of how they got there. One of their party members is
wounded, another is paralyzed, and they can hear the receding shouts of one of their
hirelings coming from the hallway as he is dragged away by. . . something. None of
them have any idea what is going on, or how they got there. At least, their mapper
seems to have a decent map of the place.
Amnesia beasts sometimes get into cities, where they happily snack on people.
Witnesses are useless, and search parties forget they ever saw it as soon as the thing
gets out of sight. It fights with a random mix of kicks, bites, and tentacle fondles
(only one attack each round).
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ALABASTER HOUND OF YOG
HD 6
AC 9 [10]
Atk +6 Bite (1d6 damage + naivety on a failed save)
Atk +6 Kick (1d8 damage)
Atk +4 Tentacles (0 damage + paralysis 2d6 rounds on a failed save)
Move 15
Save 13
Morale 8
Special naivety, amnesia, elfwyrd
Amnesia: If you gaze upon an Alabaster Hound for a round or less, you instantly
forget it as soon as you stop looking at it. If you gaze upon an Alabaster Hound for
multiple rounds and then lose sight of it for more than a round, you forget the last
1d20+4 hours. This is permanent.
Elfwyrd : Elves and creatures with Wis 13+ are immune to the Amnesia ability of
the Alabaster Hound of Yog. Instead, they cannot forget the Hound. Even stranger,
they are compelled to talk in the third person, and refer to the Hound in the first.
("Where did I go? What was I, that thing with the tentacles? Wait, what 's wrong
with the way the cleric is talking?") Creatures affected in this way get -1 to all d20
rolls because of the distraction. This lasts until they find a way to forget the
Alabaster Hound (such as with exotic drugs or the services of a morimancer).
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The Beast with 10,000 Names
Each turn, this creature attacks with 2 snapping bludgeons and its vibrating gullet
emits another crumple wave. Parties that survive will forever struggle to describe it,
even to themselves.
INDESCRIBABLE LEVIATHAN
Spiraling Bulk 15 HD
Feathered Leather AC 3 [16]
Snapping Bludgeons +12/+12 (3d6 damage, can't both attack the same target)
Peristaltic Gait move 12, fly 9
Rhythmic Head save 3
Ineffable Essence 11
Dreadful Talents crumple wave, luminous blood
Crumple Wave: 1 target 10'-30' distant takes 5d6 damage and is knocked 10'-60'
backwards, landing prone. A successful save halves the damage and the distance, and
avoids landing prone.
Luminous Blood : The ichor of an indescribable leviathan has two effects. It both
reverses gravity and radiates light (a splash as a candle, a pool as a torch). Creatures
in melee have a 25% chance on each hit to splash a significant amount of blood on
themselves (unless using bludgeons). If this happens, the creature will levitate off the
ground, given them -4 to hit and usually rendering them immobile.
This creature has accumulated an tremendous number of names over its many
encounters, most of which are completely inaccurate. Some of these names are :
ethereal moose, shaggy gurbirder, planar roc, vector wraith, feral dog-gobbler,
infinity worm, double brain scorpion, knocky-wood guardian, dread solipsist, spiral
dragon, thorsbane, dire dwarf, mercurial planet-pflenger, and nockenwrath.
10
Crocodile Inside Your Body
This is how they work: Like any virus, they jump inside one of your body cells.
Then, incredibly, they write down all of their instructions on some DNA and inject it
into your DNA. So now you've got this virus living in the DNA of your cell. When
the virus (in DNA form) “senses” that conditions are ripe (food, division, the cops
have left), it pops out of your DNA and commences the takeover.
Sometimes, after turning into DNA and hiding in your genome, this provirus gets
smacked with a mutation, and it breaks. It gets stuck in your genome because the
instructions for getting out of your genome are broken. So it just sits there, like an
axe murderer who hid in your closet and then died. And sometimes this DNA gets
passed down to your kids. And their kids.
Your DNA is filled with dead axe murderers who crawled in there and died millions
of years ago. I only tell this to hopefully impart a sense of perspective.
A long, long ago, there was a race of terrible reptiles, powerful in sorcery and in
war. We know them now as the the Serpent People.
One of their most feared abilities was the power to turn themselves into something
akin to a ghost, and then possess your body, making your their puppet. Sometimes,
very rarely, they would become trapped in the flesh of their victim. Even more
rarely, they had children in this state, and over time, the spirit of the serpent people
passed on into their descendants.
Fragmented and thinned, these shards of the Serpent People still echoed in the DNA
of the descendants of their slaves. They had becomes ghosts in the genome.
And although, they are faded and shattered, these shadows of great reptile sorcerers
can still be sometimes conjured out of the blacker regions of the bloodline with the
casting of a rare spell, known as the exorcism of the flesh, in which the cast spirit is
cast out and imbued with a body of its own. If cast on you, the creature would burst
from your body and do the bidding of the caster. You 'd feel strangely lighter and
subtly different. Your favorite food might change. The spell never works on the
same creature twice (you only have one croclugon inside your body).
The resulting creature is not one of the Serpent People. It is sickly wreck, warped
by time and diffusion, and made weird by the eons. It walks on four legs and
struggles to speak. With difficulty, it may stand upright. This creature is called a
croclogon, and nearly all of them are insane.
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ANTEDILUVIAN CROCLOGON
HD 4
AC 4 [15]
Atk +4 Bite (1d8 damage, grabs on an 8, automatically chews on subsequent rounds)
Move 9, swim 9
Save 13
Morale 9
Special fractured genome, dying
Fractured Genome: The Croclogon has a 50% chance of being able to cast the last
spell that the parent creature cast (if applicable). The Croclogon has a 50 % chance of
being able to breathe sludge (1d4 damage in a 30' cone, a failed save also means that
creatures move at half speed and get -2 to attack until they rinse off). The croclogon
has a 50% chance to "inherit" a racial ability from its parent. The croclogon has a
50% chance to be intelligent and know secrets in the ancient language of the snake
people. The croclogon has a 50% chance to be reasonable instead of immediately
hostile and insane.
Dying: When a croclogon is created with the exorcism of the flesh spell, roll a d10
to see how many minutes the croclogon can survive before collapsing into a pile of
broken crocodile parts and confused ghosties. On a 1, the croclogon dies upon
arriving. On a 10, the croclogon is stable, and will survive indefinitely.
Liquid Zoo
The creation of life is a violent art, and has more in common with pipe bombs and
welding than it does with planting a seed. When in the process of creating a new
creature, skin-weaver wizards must duel with flesh in hot laboratories, shoving
unwilling life-stuff into into the imperfect meat they labored to build. Instrumental
in this process is an almost-creature called a psychoplasm. However, this process
sometimes goes awry, and the jellied mindlet cascades past the safeguards and escapes.
Psychoplasms are liquid zoos, swimming with all the juices of all the animals it has
ever encountered and imagined. There's penguin blood in there, churning around with
cerebrospinal fluid of pigs and the amniotic juices of dragon eggs. It echoes these
forms without thinking. It is more of a chemical reaction than it is a creature. It has
no mind.
It tracks living creatures the way flowers track the sun, turning and growing under
exposure. The psychoplasm is different as the sky is from the sea, although all three
are beautiful shades of blue.
It's fast. It bubbles and leaps, skittering across the ground like a drop of water on a
hot skillet. It reacts to minds. It needs to coat your brain and minimize the surface
tension. It pours itself sideways under the hydraulics of external consiousnesses.
It has no fixed size or shape. It barely has a fixed location. It 's an electric blue fluid
that constantly produces armors, tools, faces, weapons . . . each and all bobbing to
the surface as it is needed and then sinking away again. It "borrows " the best stats
from the creatures nearby. This should be obvious, such as the paladin 's armor
suddenly appearing upon the thing, the fighter's sword arm swings out from it, a
miniature dragon spitting a gout of flame, all splashing out of and into blue jelly.
And the whole time, you can see animals swimming it, recreated from memory—both
its own and the memories of others. Giraffes, harpies, dragons. . . your dead mother
may even appear in the pyschoplasm, noiselessly mouthing words of encouragement.
Your old instructor might shake his head in disappointment as he watches you stumble
and the blue jelly lashes you to ribbons.
13
ANTAGONISTIC PSYCHOPLASM
HD 1 + HD of the highest HD thing in 100'
AC 1 point better than the best AC in 100' (or 8 [11] if alone)
Atk 1 point better than the best AC in 100' (or +1 if alone)
attacks 3 random nearby creatures, each hit does 1 damage/HD
Move faster than the fastest creature in 100' (or 30' if alone)
Save 1 point better than the best save in 100' (or 16 if alone)
Morale 12
Special react, anticipate,
chaos
Anticipate: Every turn, the psychoplasm will do something really strange in addition
to its normal attacks. Roll at random.
1 - Double in size (8x in volume).
2 - Return to original size
3 - Breathe fire (30' cone, 1d6 damage per HD, save for half)
4 – Lightning bolt (60' line, 1d6 damage per HD, save for half)
4 - Turn into a cube for 1 turn. Takes no actions but reflects magic.
5 – Lose cohesion for 1 turn, becoming watery. Immune to mundane weapons.
6 - Change color.
7 - Split into two, each with half HP. If already split, rejoin instead.
8 - Speak the memories of a random person nearby. 25% chance of deepest secret.
9 - Flee. Rush out, like a ghastly rapid river.
10 - Healing Cloud. All creatures within 10' heal HP equal to the psychoplasm 's
HD + 1 and turn the same color as the psychoplasm (permanent).
Chaos: Each attack is a randomly type. This is mostly for flavor, but you can roll
if it really matters. Roll a d8: 1 fire, 2 lightning, 3 ice, 4 sonic, 5 psychic, 6
slashing, 7 bludgeoning, 8 piercing. It literally attacks with everything imaginable.
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