Menaces of Otherlore

The Known World is a strange place, one that has ways of echoing both the conscious and subconscious of the mortals that populate it. Beyond the Primal forces harnessed in acts of magic through sheer understanding and willpower, and the fuel for the extraordinary that is tangible Faith, the power of hope and trust shared willingly, there are other, more fearsome mechanisms at work. For just because the Free Folk are caught between the Holy Throne in the southwest and the Nightmare in the northeast, it doesn't mean the danger always comes from those same directions. All sorts of creatures exist outside the domains of mortals and beasts, and for every helpful and caring wood sprite to subtly guide lost children to grandma's cabin, there are ten moss-wights lying still and hungry in the roots of a thousand year tree, waiting for some poor fool to stop to rest.

There are several classifications that the Otherlore bestiary are broken down into. Undead are creatures of spiritual or living matter that was once alive, died and was made to rise again. Monsters with a capital-M are creatures made flesh from collective imagination, often either from folklore or shared dreams, and are creatures of twisted whimsy or strange logic and bargains. Primordials are beasts that were engineered by the Fae in the time when they crafted the World, hybrids with a spark of greater reasoning that were twisted and made corrupt when the Wild was debased by the Primal Light and Dark. And there's even more obscure things, things tied to the deeper Primal forces of the world, artificially animate Constructs powered by equal parts science and magic, the terrible and beautiful menagerie of the Nightmare's many servants and the blinding, scorching, demi-god glory of the Holy Throne's Nobility.

Part of Adrienne and I's goal with Otherlore is creating a bestiary that feels less like a sourcebook for a setting and more like a book of new (and old-but-rejiggered) fairy tale and folklore creatures that just happen to have statblocks attached to them. One of the things that we both agreed with is that we should be looking to create dangerous creatures and supernatural threats that can be dealt with in ways other than simply reducing hit points to zero. While some of Otherlore's bestiary will neither be denied nor reasoned with, some can be bargained with or drawn away with clever tricks, or have weaknesses exploited to put down a single adversary and possibly even scare off the rest of the pack. We'll get into the deeper specifics of what's planned for creature mechanics and how to play with them. For now, here's five of the creatures you'll be seeing in the core rulebook.

Unhallowed

“Once came an unhallowed-man to sow his crop and reap’t our little hamlet’s fall.”

The botanical menace that grows in the most cursed and forsaken places of the Venomire isn’t simply limited to poison. For in the deepest and most chaotic tangle of places where even the most bold or crazed Venomirans hesitate to go, there’s a place once so mundane and charmingly benign, the palpable fear it carries seems at first ridiculous. It used to be a pumpkin patch, in the age before the full terror of the Nightmare was known to mortals. When its rise spread from the North and rampaged across the scarred and battered country that is the Freelands now, this humble plot of vegetables became a twisted proving ground for a Sorcerer of the Want to realize his dreams, of an engine of eternal destruction that grew from carcasses and seeds. Ironically, the Sorcerer, whose name is eternally lost and existence would not even be known were not for his preserved remains, didn’t realize his own success; in a moment of ecstatic despair, as nothing seemed to grow and he believed himself unworthy of the Nightmare’s perfecting torment, he summoned forth unholy cold and solidified himself into an ice-unto-stone, never to thaw.

His corpse now presides stoically over the ground zero that would be his creation come to fruition, a tangling of life and death that is no scholar’s typical definition of undeath, yet fits it perfectly all the same. For where his plants grow and bear fruit, the do so by tangling up the buried dead in their roots and vines. Torn tissue is stitched together with creeper lacing and destroyed organs are regrown as gourds and fruit. Green ichor messily pressurizes a dead heart and collapsed veins, driving the incomplete reason and malfunctioning wit of a rotted brain. This evil crop rises with one directive: add to the patch. They look like scarecrows, but they kill like premeditated murderers and proceed to tend the garden with the remains like diligent groundskeepers.

A single Unhallowed is no threat to a seasoned warrior, or even a practiced one; leaves, vines and fruit-flesh can’t match the strength of muscle, bone and sinew, even if it is bolstered with its own rotted mortal matter. But they aren’t a force of marauders that rages screaming from the treeline as they descend upon a city to pillage and burn. Unhallowed are instead a murder-cult in all but religion that is capable growing from a single seed planted with care in an unmarked grave, or fed to an unburied body. Whether it be a traveller uncared for in the cold and unburied in the thaw, or a betrayed neighbor returned from a shallow hole they were covered with rocks in, it doesn’t matter how strong or adept it is with a sword when it jumps on your back, covers your mouth with a cold hand and drives a kitchen knife into your side a dozen times. And when it wears the face of someone you once knew, only pale and slightly green or orange, you’ll find yourself more than a little off your guard when it comes for you.

Bury your dead. Hold funerals. Care for the homeless. And for the love of whatever god is yours, make sure there aren’t Unhallowed growing with your pumpkins.

The Stigadier

“A dream of a thousand tin button-eyes mirroring the same gleeful hate.”

The focus and logic of the sleeping gremlin mind is one that has the capability to maintain lucid control like few others. Gremlin don’t sleep like babies, because babies can only stay down like that for an hour or so at a time, and this is owed to the fact that gremlins have very healthy and stable dream lives, more or less capable of lucidly entertaining themselves while their tenuously physical form rests.

But the mind is a tricky thing, for a mind left to idle in despair becomes a mind prone to fixation and rumination. Unhealthiness and unhappiness lead to uneasy dreams, and a gremlin’s mind that is dreaming uneasily has dreams of strange new natural orders, of math equations that are illogical yet correct, of things that can’t be and yet are. In these things, they see the dark mirror image of themselves, the gremlin, the builder-kind, but born of the chaos and cold of cruel and naked existence, not the order and warmth of a tended and safe home. From the horror of anathema, the being takes a shape in mind that it copies when it finds the means to take flesh. They see eyes from a void, a bright and cold silver, like flickering chemical lights flaring in a blizzard. They see elongated proportions, long and stilt-like, like some cruel mockery of their own diminutive forms, clad in a long coat that binds like a straitjacket from the waist up and billows like a cape from the waist down, beneath a red hat with a wide brim. His claws are not claws, they’re a phalanx of twisted and bladed metal tools that whirr and spin and pry and cut. His heavy metal shoes clang when he walks and thunder when he leaps, keeping him immovable when he sets his stance to some task in his terrible plan. This is the form of the anti-gremlin, the malevolent antithesis of all that they strive for as a collective being; this is the shape of the Stigadier.

And where goes the Stigadier, so go his inventions. He, like the gremlin themselves, is a creator. But nothing he creates is in good intention: things made of spikes and vitriol, explosives and glass, brass and anger; they like him are hate given shape. 

The Stigadier is a particularly pure monster; though he can manifest in many places, and some accounts with parallel dates allow for the possibility that he could be in at least two places at once, monstrologists agree that the Stigadier is one unique entity, rather than a clan or species of individual monsters. This is because the Stigadier is undeniably a personality, and not simply a manifestation of more common nightmares. A gleeful genius in the fields of mayhem, destruction and petty mischief, he could be mistaken as some sort of creature of counterculture resistance. He will see you suffer for that, possibly killing loved ones in front of you for making that mistake. The Stigadier is a craftsman that puts his mark into his creations, his army of tin minions, his deathtraps, his bombs, his poisons and diseases. He watches, observes, muses and daydreams. He thinks and considers, admits mistakes and revises to do better. And he has no reason to any of this other than to harm for the sake of harm. For what is a monster than a thing that does only harm for no benefit, for no reason other than the thing itself?

Dragons

“What happens to the divine right of kings when it stews in the shame of its inevitable defeat?”

Death is a process. The organism ceases, the body begins to decay and the mass of tissue and organs begins to break down back into the land that once sustained it. In time, all that remains is all the soil can reclaim. But sometimes, a strong enough will can limit what the soil can reclaim, which is why in some places of the Known World, burial customs have people putting more weight on top of graves than some would consider normal.

This can prevent a dead tyrant from rising again. But weight alone can’t hold down the will of a dead empire. For the dominance and control of a powerful ruler, the subservience of their nobility and the fear and despair of their subjects is a heady brew, one that can change the nature of soil, stone and the ruins built upon them. The will of an empire bleeds together, from many to one, into a thing with an intellect beyond mortals but also the instinct of a pitiless, lizard-brained predator. To have, to accumulate, to sit upon and deny from all rivals- these are the things this living echo of power dreams about as it manifests. This gestating wyrm-force lives this dream beneath the surface of its egg, the ruins what was once its great seat of power. It savors the thought of having; it seethes at thoughts of all it doesn’t have now. But when the time comes, the shell cracks and a dragon is born from the wreck of lost, brutal glory, the creature that emerges will do all in its power to realize that dream.

And power is all that it has.

The dragon is a juggernaut of saurian might and immortal id. A dragon needs nothing and wants all that can be had; one can be sated, and some for quite a while, but even the largest meals are digested. Its mind is made of the thoughts of emperors, the calculating of those that did their bidding at their behest and the ferocity of those that carried out their most brutal commands. Its flesh is made from the labor of the dominated and oppressed, the same spent force that laid brick upon brick to make castles, pounded iron into swords and cast gold into fortunes of coins. Its scales are made of those bricks, those swords and those coins, stone and metal armour to stop blades, bullets and even bombs. And with its breath it speaks only destruction, a sound that can otherwise only be made and have the meaning come through properly with the march of an army bearing torches. They are a creature that is a perfect expression of predatory malevolence, not simply a personification of power, but an apotheosis of the id that craves it as well.

It’s that nature that makes the dragon the ultimate threat. A dragon cannot be reasoned with, as only its reason is law; a dragon cannot be bargained with, as whatever you have that it wants will be taken without question. A dragon can only be provoked to act, for they dislike being robbed, and nothing gets a bigger rise from a dragon that robbing its pride. 

When a dragon acts, you better be prepared. You and your army.

Buggani

“Amazing how terrible a thing seems when it turns from a pride to a shame.”

In days when the Fae oversaw the growth of the World from Wild potential, they had many agents. Among them were the Great Beasts, the beasts to which emerged whole from the Wild and against which others were defined by their contrast. But they also had their own creations, beasts of greater mind which did not emerge from the Wild, but were instead wrought from its domains in the workshops of the Fae-Homes. Of them, the Buggani were stalwart labourers and builders of the natural world. They were made from bears and mammoths, strong from the roots of their foundation, lifters and haulers, who set stones and mounded earth into hills and mountains. They did their work with a quiet pride and diligence, made with an instinct to know when to rest, how to collaborate and what shape their latest creation need take. It was their might and the grace of the Wild that piled high the tallest peaks of the known world, and it was the same that dug the deepest caverns.

When the Wild was downcast by Light and Dark and the Fae were debased with it, so were their own creations debased. Their Buggani were among the most affected. Once ponderous and gentle giants that knew where the mountains needed to go, they became distorted and dangerous. Driven by a singular urge to build-more-bigger-better, the herds of these creatures turned on one another in titanic rages, pounding one another quite literally into the soil. Gore-slick victors led bands of submissive defeated into obscurity over the broken bodies of their former herdmates. In seclusion, driven by a mix of instinct, pride and wrath, these empires of double-digits work tirelessly to build the mountains of their Victorious Ones. Anyone or anything that gets in their way will be added to the pile one way or the other.

Created to reflect the physical strength innate to the Wild itself, the average buggani worker stands easily a half-again as tall as the biggest danan and typically weighs four times as much. Capable of moving on four legs or two, these creatures are primarily instinctual, but have the reasoning to utilize hand tools and grasp basic physics. Allowing yourself to be surprised by the intelligence of these giants is often fatal; it’s hubris to think a the creature lining up a boulder throw that is clearly judging for distance wouldn’t also remember to lead a moving target, and it’s hubris to the degree that tends to take heads off shoulders. They have the stocky limbs and paws of a grizzly, but the tusks of a mammoth, upon a frame that can pack more muscle pound for pound than either. Their more dominant members can be even bigger, with the few ancient Victorious still alive in the world being themselves larger than some monuments. They can break the support beams of houses with forearm smashes and bend iron bars with their jaws, but more alarmingly, they can also work together from within their own group hierarchies. Among their weaknesses is their shaggy, full body coats. Though it can shut out all but the most oppressive cold and sheet off all but the worst rain, it both stinks for miles and burns quite easily. They can also be distracted with a particularly extravagant and potentially destructive decoy, a landslide, for even their debasement can’t dissuade old instincts to take stewardship of the mountains. 

Nowhere Men

“Alas, twas clothes that made the man, but unmade him as well.”

The essence of a monster is a creature born of fear and imagination, a being that has sunk deep enough root into mortal consciousness that it can manifest as flesh and blood, its echo rings in the Worldsoul so strongly. It’s for that reason that so many monsters are creatures born from children’s stories, for young minds with rich imaginations breed terrible monsters. No more is this more true than in the case of the Nowhere Men, beings which exist purely because of a tale told to boys to terrify them into treating their clothes with the proper respect. If you wash them, put them out to dry properly, and if you don’t, put them away properly. If you don’t show them that respect, all the wicked little boys who Never Were will get a chance to have what you take for granted. Wicked they may be, but “little boys” are far from the reality of these beings.

Nowhere Men are often mistaken for undead, a haunting from angry ghosts or even spirits of malice. In fact, they’re nothing but pure dreamstuff made matter, though it’s a nearly insubstantial amount of matter at that. These beings manifest in discarded clothes, though seldom inhabiting the idly thrown-in-a-heap laundry of neglectful little boys, like the stories told mother-to-son that first inspired their shape. Instead, they find their way into inhabiting discarded garments on roadside, left in fields, thrown haphazard from looted trunks in search of the real valuables or simply forgotten on the backs of chairs and left in the cold. Whatever they do inhabit, they wear as though it were worn as a perfect fit. Nowhere Men have been observed as capable of inhabiting a single piece of clothing, as small as a glove, though adding to their outfit increases their physical potence.  At first glance, they seem solid, if filled by invisible mass. Their true lack of substance becomes known when they move with speed, where they less resemble people with the flesh and hair parts invisible, and more resemble ramshackle kites being pulled by phantom strings. Their method of attack is binding and constricting, breaking victims like a rack, hanging them from thin air or simply strangling them in their beds. They make no noise and can lie themselves flat and inanimate- just a pile of musty old clothes that someone threw away for being threadbare and stained.

Attacking in groups, Nowhere Men are simple in their malevolence. Though not without some trickster tendencies, mostly they exist to cause pain and harm, behaving as basic pack hunters in groups four to eight, preying upon lone travellers, people lost on backcountry roads and drunks stumbling home from the mead hall. They can be surprisingly durable and difficult to put down without the right tools of slaying, since simply physically tearing up the clothes they’re inhabiting is considerably more difficult when the clothes themselves are trying to tear you up right back. Blades work, but it’s a tough job, as you either have to shred the clothes to pieces, or get lucky and hit enough of the Nowhere Man’s roiling and fluctuating strange matter to wound it, which will almost certainly kill it instantly. Fire or vitriol makes easier work, but if you can lead them to a river and make them chase you across it, it will be their doom- not only does a wash in running freshwater break the Nowhere Man, nicely folding the clothes after a proper dry prevents them from being repossessed.