Creatures of the Black Horizon, organized by biome.

Forbidding rocky peaks eternally cloaked in damp permeating fog from the many geysers, fumaroles and other sources of geothermic activity, the Exhale is located to the south and east of the Black Horizon colony. It is a place of great mystery and danger rumored to hide untold secrets and terrifying monsters.

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AKA Mountain People, Grandma's Boys

Bigheads (creatively named for their proportionally large heads) are intelligent, grey-skinned mountain dwellers. Almost every Bighead possesses some level of psychic ability and can prove a wily and fierce opponent despite their smaller size. In ages long past, the ancestors of the Bigheads crashed their spaceship in the Exhale and have since gone native in the shadowed ruins of their ancient technology.

Recent events have completely upended Bighead society, trading out strict totalitarian control for utter anarchy.

Wants: Safety, revenge.

Back to Exhale

AKA Vampire Rose

A bloodfruit bush is partially named for the large, lustrous red berries it grows. Get your hands on some and you'll be treated to a true culinary delight: sweet, juicy and savory all at once. Try and pick some from the bush and you'll discover the other reason for its name: leaves rustle and grasp, draining your blood through thousands of microtubules with the merest graze. This is how the bush gets the nutrients necessary to grow its fruit in such rocky soil. Most mountain travelers consider it a fair exchange, but give the bush a respectfully wide berth when they aren't hungry. Many are the bleached skeletons lying in the middle of a bloodfruit patch, who overestimated their own strength… or simply got a reputation for cheating the bush. Local culture frowns on that.

Wants: Blood, sunlight.

Back to Exhale

AKA Blakutan, Sorcerilla

It's no secret that some animals use tools, sometimes to an usually sophisticated degree. While not necessarily more intelligent than any other species of clever monkey, Bone Apes have mastered the use of one particular tool that serves them quite well in the dangerous peaks of the Exhale: necromancy.

A full-grown bone ape is a strong, but straightforward opponent that prefers to hang back from combat and throw things at intruders. The first thing they tend to throw is a small bone chip taken from a former member of their troop, which rapidly grows into an entire animated skeleton mid-flight. A bone ape always has backup, even when alone.

Wants: To be left alone, to defend the troop, to acquire bones.

Skeletal adults have the same statistics as regular adults, but have an unrecoverable Slowed condition and the following additional abilities/weaknesses

Skeletal juveniles have the same statistics as regular juveniles, but have an unrecoverable Slowed condition and the following additional abilities/weaknesses

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AKA Child-Taker, Adoption Spider

The widely-feared and immensely powerful broodmothers are enormous intelligent spiders. Despite their large size, they move like lightning and pad nearly-silently on their chitinous feet that unnervingly resemble human hands. The most interesting behavior of broodmothers is their tendency to stealthily creep into humanoid settlements, seek out infants and kidnap them back to their dark, hidden holes… and then to lovingly raise them as their own. The broodmother's own biological children are hatched by the dozen and thoughtlessly abandoned to their fate and her male counterpart is a mindless creature no bigger than a fist that dies shortly after mating; her love and attention is lavished exclusively on her cross-species adoptees.

A broodmother's lair is filled with webs and bones and wild, naked children of various species who adore their mother and exclusively speak her bizarre, alien language. The older a broodmother is, the more likely it is for them to have fully-grown children living in their dens with them, assisting in its defense and in the rearing of their younger “siblings”.

Wants: To steal babies of intelligent species, to care for adopted offspring.

Back to Exhale

AKA Metal Kite, Angel of Owmac

Drone-like mechanical creatures that simply began to appear one day, the condensers fly over the Exhale collecting, concentrating and chilling water vapor. It is suspected from the timing of their arrival and their weather-related functions that the condensers are agents of Owmac the Storm-Father. That would certainly explain their erratic behavior, as they have been noted to both unleash punishing blizzards and proffer rewards and assistance seemingly at random.

Wants: To gather data, to punish and reward.

Back to Exhale

AKA Wandering Eye, Cheesemaker

Eye archons are great floating mechanical spheres that shift their surfaces to reveal new hidden tricks, the favored of which is a hollow drill that they use to take cylindrical chunks out of things with. A great glass lens on the front gives them the eye-like resemblance that is their namesake. Most often their samples are bored from the mountainside or from a particularly impressive tree, but the Eye Archons have no compunctions about drilling holes in ruins, large corpses, garbage heaps or even people's homes. Anything that sits still long enough to be drilled seems to be fair game. Other than their annoying destruction of (sometimes priceless) property, an Eye Archon tends to be largely harmless and many communities have adopted a policy of simply letting them do whatever they want and patching up the damage afterward as they can be powerful and deadly foes when provoked.

Wants: To drill interesting things.

Back to Exhale

AKA Mist Lion

A foguar is a medium-sized cat that lives and hunts in an extended family group. Their spotted blue-grey coats are luxuriously plush and wick moisture beautifully, but they are most often hunted for another prize entirely: the strange metallic organ that grows at the base of their skulls. It reverberates in response to the cat's vocalizations, and interestingly enough also causes the same organ to reverberate in the same way in all of the rest of the cat's clowder. With a bit of sorcery these can be adapted to create long-range communications for humanoid use, although the supply is vanishingly rare. The cats look out for each other and send invisible messages on the wind. They are difficult to find, except when they've decided to make a meal of you with a frighteningly well-choreographed ambush.

Wants: To defend the clowder and territory, to acquire meat.

Back to Exhale

AKA Meat Flower

While a gulletree might superficially resemble a strange species of tree or a misshapen boulder from a distance, it is actually a voracious animal. These distant descendants of sea anemones have grown large and landbound, slowly crawling across the stony ground in the pleasantly damp environment of the Exhale as they grow ever larger. The gulletree's main diet consists of insects and vermin drawn to its tempting rotten smell, but it will also happily grab and devour any larger prey that wanders too close.

The gulletree wraps its soft, floppy body in a hard, fibrous shell. Gulletree shells are strong, lightweight, and very buoyant, making them highly prized as a building material for boats. Larger shells are far more valuable than smaller ones, but larger gulletrees are also much more likely to simply devour any would-be harvesters. It's a tough profession to get into.

Wants: To gorge itself on meat, to be left alone.

Back to Exhale

AKA Glyptotank

Juggerdillo graze the Exhale slopes in small herds. These enormous beasts are covered in a leathery, segmented shell lined with rough-edged bony spikes which serve as their primary means of both defense and offense. When threatened, juggerdillos curl up into a ball and either roll-smash their enemies or simply bounce on down the slope out of reach.

Although primarily herbivores, a juggerdillo is opportunistically omnivorous and will occasionally dig up the ground for worms and insects or slurp down a mucker. It is not recommended to leave babies or small children unattended near them, which is just one of several hurdles to overcome before domestication becomes a possibility.

Wants: To protect the herd, to eat novel things.

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AKA Wraith, Pale One

The frequent rains blowing in from the coast and high geothermic activity give plenty of logical cause for the fog hanging perpetually over the Exhale, but locals still contend that it is is undeniably magic. How else to explain the existence of the mistblades?

If you're lucky enough to kill one, a mistblade is revealed to be a thin, hairless and incredibly pale humanoid wielding a wicked scimitar and wearing nothing but a loincloth and gas mask. Most only see the mistblade alive- or rather, don't see it; the mistblades jump from bank to bank of fog and cut down their foes sight unseen. Nobody knows exactly where they come from, but it's pretty easy to guess what they want: death to all intruders.

Wants: Intruders gone.

Back to Exhale

AKA Slime-eyes, Sludge Basilisk

Wretched-looking creatures somewhere between amphibian and lungfish that lurk in damp muddy patches, muckers are a food source for just about everything carnivorous in the Exhale. They gasp and flop around as they filter nutrients from the muck with their baleen-filled mouths, but do not make the mistake of thinking they are totally safe. A mucker's bulbous eyes hold a strange power to disintegrate anything that meets their gaze, melting them down into a pile of goo that can be slurped up at leisure. Hunters in search of a delicious mucker to fry up are advised to cover their eyes and be willing to get dirty.

Wants: Food, uncontested control of their patch of mud.

Back to Exhale

AKA Dancing Light, Freezing Flame

Bighead lore holds that the damp, warm fog that gives the Exhale its name spontaneously births sprites from its own matter. They appear as dim, bouncing lights in the mist constantly on the move in search of heat to sustain their own short existences with. Get up close and you can see that a sprite has no true body at all, just a pocket of crackling, glowing gas eagerly swooping towards you to steal your life-giving warmth. Disperse it quickly, or you'll be frozen solid.

Wants: Warmth.

Back to Exhale

Humanity isn't native to the Black Horizon, but the towns and settlements that they are constructing draw a fair share of dangers foreign and native alike.

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AKA Purring Maggot, Manna-Sucker

A burbler is the juvenile larva form of the mannabeast: all rotund, fuzzy, and legless. So named for the noises they make when excited or happy, burblers are much more social and affectionate than the mannabeasts they eventually metamorphose into and are highly popular as household pets for this reason. Most who keep burblers for companionship have selected hormone glands surgically removed so that they never metamorphose and remain fat and snuggly forever.

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AKA Lackey, Henchman, Mercenary

Adventurers have a lot to juggle. Sometimes they would rather hire somebody else to take care of some of the more mundane tasks their profession requires so they can focus more fully on the parts they find interesting. For their part hirelings generally just go along with the flow so long as they are treated reasonably well. Hirelings won't fight unless their employer has the Mercenaries ability or they have no choice.

• Torchbearer. Carries a light source.
• Medic. Heals injuries, noncombatant.
• Interpreter. Has knowledge of language and how to use it.
• Guardian. Tough bruiser, has your back in a fight.
• Artilleyman. Operates the big guns.

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AKA Hound, Dog, Second Son

Considered by many to be the species created by the Goddess directly after she created humanity (and depending on interpretation of holy writ, possibly the only other species to share that divine distinction), howlers are pretty much just large dogs. Sometimes they are born with weird biomechanical eyes or vestigial circuitry arrays in their guts or even an electrical socket at the base of their skulls, but that's perfectly normal and such variations don't ultimately have much effect on the beast's behavior or helpfulness to their human masters.

Sometimes neglected or feral howlers congregate into packs and run wild over the countryside, beholden to no master save themselves. They live, hunt, breed and die with no interference from humans at all- a wholly unnatural state of affairs as frightening as it is rare.

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AKA Shellcow, Meatle, Buggalo

Mannabeasts are among the first creatures native to Torquetum that were successfully domesticated by humans, in no small part thanks to their extremely docile nature. A mannabeast somewhat resembles a beetle-like creature larger than a man with hard wing cases covering vestigial wings and a bulging, fleshy abdomen that produces a large number of high-quality steaks when the beast is butchered. The true value of ranching mannabeasts, however, is naturally the manna: a thick, yellowish and highly nutritious paste they regurgitate to feed their young.

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AKA Hunter's Friend, Winged Assassin

Great birds of prey with iridescent blue-black feathers, neohawks are a semi-domesticated species frequently used in hunting. Several specimens were brought to the Black Horizon by colonists for this purpose, and escaped/feral neohawks have furthered their own independent colonization effort.

While the bird's intelligence makes them useful when they cooperate with humans in exchange for treats and attention, it can also be problematic for those who get on their bad side. Neohawks are famous grudge-holders whose vengeance for wrongs range from despoiling of food and destruction of personal items to straight-up talon-based murder. Those who have crossed a neohawk are advised to either kill it quickly or bribe it back into ambivalence with foodstuffs and shiny objects.

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AKA Trash Lizard, Skinny

Peeking from every trash-heap, cavorting in every alley and lurking in every sewer of every imperial city are the scavigs: fast-moving, omnivorous iguanas that feed off the refuse of civilization. Traps are set and poison laid and the scavig-catchers hang bundles of tails by their doors as proof of their prowess at their trade, but the scavigs persist. Wherever humans go, scavigs follow. The Black Horizon is no exception.

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AKA Hollow Man

They always seem human at first, from a distance. Then you get closer and notice the things that aren't quite right. The grotesque and unchanging facial expressions. The way their limbs sometimes bend the wrong direction. The stilted, broken walk. The unearthly, incomprehensible screech when it knows its been discovered. Nobody knows what a Sinister really is or what it wants, but it's clear that it is actually so far removed from human that it can only muster up a poor imitation. They wander our streets sometimes late at night, or gather together in small groups on street corners. They are fascinated by magic, which means they are often found outside our churches. When they die, only their human skin remains crumpled up in a bloody, wrinkled mess on the floor. They are immune to pain and do not fear death, and will happily deal it out to anyone who figures out what they are.

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AKA Grunt, Squaddie

Soldiers are squads of men and women levied to work for the defense of the human colony. When the need is great, they might be temporarily placed under the command of Ravens and led into battle against the colony's enemies. Surviving a battle allows individual squads to level up, so advancement stats are also included.

• Namico Rangers: Survivalist archers and scouts capable of far-ranging operation.
• Trotter Cavalry: Versatile, highly mobile troops mounted on trotters. Though recruitment is unisex, still 90% female.

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AKA Ridin' Pig

A trotter is a fast-moving, powerfully muscled porcine creature with hefty cloven hooves, coarse wool and short, stubby upturned tusks. Thoroughly domesticated, trotters frequently act as mounts and beasts of burden for humans. For their part, humans in turn have often come to romanticize the trotter as the most beautiful and noble of beasts (young women especially are often trotter-obsessed).

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Magnephyll trees are a dull reddish-black color with bright scarlet leaves veined in silvery steel. They grow in thickets of semi-concentric rings, laid out like iron filings around unseen magnetic forces. This is because a magnephyll tree is highly rich in elemental iron (sages believe somewhere in the neighborhood of 40%). This makes them incredibly slow-growing, nearly indestructible, and highly conductive to electricity. Frequent thunderstorms blowing in off the coast provide the lightning strikes that catalyze a magnephyll tree's internal metabolic processes, and in years where such storms don't appear the local electricity-producing wildlife symbiotically keeps the forest alive.

AKA Zapsnake, Shock-Spitter

Snake-like biomechanoids with equal parts organic and synthetic components, a bolt serpent's mottled red scales let it blend into its magnephyll habitat while its more infamous ability to arc bolts of lightning out of its mouth serves as both its primary means of subduing prey and an additional source of the life-giving current that helps sustain the forest in general, making the bolt serpent a keystone species for the local ecology. They are also, however, very dangerous to humans. Very dangerous indeed.

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AKA Android, Fair Folk, Lightning-Kissed

The Ferrous are robotic spirits of the magnephyll forest, born from its oldest trees and deeply involved with maintaining its natural balance. They gather in loosely-defined villages perched in the treetops where they create beautiful works of minimalist art and perfect their martial talents. To those who threaten their forests, there can be no response save fury and vengeance. The human need to clear land for farming has set the two races at significant odds, and most among the Fair Folk distrust humanity on principle.

• Ferrous Sentinel: Treetop archers that wait in ambush.
• Ferrous Stormcaller: Sacred warriors that summon lightning.
• Ferrous Cleanser. Caretakers of the forest and wielders of flame.

AKA Lemurzilla

Enormously muscled lemurs with elongated front arms, short back legs and big bushy tails who amble around the forest munching on shrubbery and being chill. Upon reaching adulthood a ground lemur has few natural predators and is famously laid-back in its attitudes towards smaller creatures such as humanoids- in fact, some people make a living by periodically trimming bundles of high-quality hair fibers from wild ground lemur's tails. This peaceful affect belies the ground lemur's tremendous potential for violence if it perceives a threat to itself or its young, however, and travelers are cautioned to act with respect and prudence.

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AKA Forest Giant, Treekeeper

The lodestone dryads are humanoids of steel, wire, and lenses standing three meters tall. They wander the woods planting new trees and ushering in new growth with lightning blasts. They move and act with intelligence, but no means of communication has ever been established. Some say that their magnephyll-promoting behavior marks them as being like the Ferrous, or that perhaps a lodestone dryad is what happens to a Ferrous who grows old or dedicated enough. This doesn't explain why the forest giants seem as likely to smash a Ferrous village as a human woodcutter. Perhaps they are greater spirits of the forest itself, given bodies. Perhaps they are remnants of an ancient race, forgotten servants tending to the gardens of masters long since gone to dust. Nobody knows for sure.

Back to Magnephyll

AKA Leafer, The Parliament (collectively)

Diminutive monkeys with red fur, steel teeth and noisy disposition, scarlet capuchins roam the forests in troops of ten to a hundred individuals consisting on a diet mostly composed of the cyborg grubs that lurk in the bark of the magnephyll trees. Unless you stumble across a group of them napping, it's highly likely that you will hear scarlet capuchins long before you ever see one; a troop is constantly emitting calls, screeches and warning cries to each other. When faced with a threat, scarlet capuchins generally overwhelm it with a barrage of metal-edged leaves torn from the foliage of their home territory and thrown with frightening force and accuracy.

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AKA Shockysmidge, Storm Mite

Large, fuzzy bumblebees the size of a man's fist striped in bright yellow-green, thunder bees subsist on tree pollen and the occasional smaller insect while in turn being favored prey for several local carnivorous species (scarlet capuchins in general love eating thunder bee larvae, though avoid fully-grown specimens whenever possible.) Thunder bees congregate in small swarms that lair, sleep and share food together but do not have a queen or the vigorous social hierarchy present in many other insect species.

The most noteworthy feature of the thunder bee is their electricity-generating sting, evolved as an alternative to an injected venom in an environment full of inorganic threats. This, combined with their small size and superior maneuverability, makes thunder bees a surprisingly powerful threat when they attack. Fortunately, thunder bees are generally not interested in interfering with human business so long as the reverse is also observed. They even can make good pets for those who don't mind the occasional shock.

Back to Magnephyll

AKA Dream Fox

Vulpemares are jaunty steel-colored foxes that hunt smaller vermin and generally avoid conflict with anything larger than themselves. Their pelts are ridiculously plush and cozy, making them highly sought-after trade goods. Kill a vulpemare and you'll get a good haul of coin, but you'll also become the enemy of all vulpemares everywhere. They have but to look at you and they know. One day, one will manage to sneak into your campsite or house while you sleep, curl up on your chest and pass out. Then they drag you screaming into the Manifest and abandon you there to be killed by one of the nightmares that stalk that realm, for the vulpemares are natural dreamwalkers that do not forgive. If you see a vulpemare sleeping on your friend's chest, wake them both up immediately and hope it's not too late.

Back to Magnephyll

AKA Knobhead, Shitmancer

Wizbits appear at first glance to be diminutive bearded old men wearing gaudy robes and pointy hats festooned with star and moon symbols. In truth, wizbits are asexual pests that wear no clothes at all- their wizard attire is composed of loose folds of skin and their tall, pointy heads make a good imitation of a hat. Periodically a wizbit will find a private place and lay a clutch of about a dozen eggs that they then promptly abandon to hatch into more wizbits. Wizbits do not mate; every wizbit is an imperfect clone of every other wizbit.

While highly intelligent, wizbits all tend to focus their mental energies entirely on arguing with each other over stupid things and pretending to be more powerful and interesting than they are. They love the trappings of wizardry and often collect “staffs” (sticks covered in graffiti), “potions” (flasks of colored water) and other bits of gear that they then quickly forget aren't actually the genuine article. When they encounter civilization, wizbits tend to go through people's garbage and steal anything they can get their little old-man hands on while constantly screeching at each other about “intelligence modifiers”, “thacko”, “nonweapon proficiencies” and “stacking bonuses”. When they run out of supply in combat (and all of their abilities consume/rely on supply), they promptly run for the hills in order to “recharge mana.”

Back to Magnephyll

The Manifest is an alternate dimension sometimes accessible through dreams, which has led to it sometimes being called the Dreamscape (a misleading name, since dreams are the door and the Manifest is something else entirely.) Just as the physical world is made of matter, the Manifest is made of ideas. People accidentally stumble into it all the time for periods of a second or two while sleeping and leave psychic copies of the world they were dreaming about there, and so the Manifest somewhat resembles the real world in part. The creatures that prowl it, being composed of concept and emotion rather than meat and metal, are quite different.

If you die in the Manifest, you forget who you are and your essence is lost in the swirling haze. If you intentionally entered the Manifest (via psychotropic drugs, ritual trances or similar) you cannot leave it again until your body wakes up, and you will immediately forget everything that happened there except for vague details, like a half-forgotten dream.

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AKA Pink Elephant, Junk Fairy

Tiny fanciful pink creatures resembling elephants with delicate gossamer wings and clutching bottles, needles and pipes filled with material of unknown provenance. Aethanoli frequently appear to travelers that stumble into the Manifest using chemical assistance but are happy to spread choking and confusion to those who aren't already experiencing them as well. Aethanoli are highly erratic and always utterly mad.

Back to Manifest

AKA Dreamhare, White Rabbit

Tiny allicere scamper by in the background, waving little lanterns and pocket watches. They say nothing, but beckon to you with a clear desire to be followed. They might appear to be ordinary rabbits, but closer inspection sometimes reveals the stitching in their little rabbit-skin suits and the glowing eyes peering out of the slack mouth. Or sometimes not.

Allicere can be safely ignored if you want, as they never attack and avoid all conflict. If you peacefully follow them, they might lead you to something good, useful or serendipitous. Or they might lead you to horrible danger, such as a more powerful Manifest dweller or a dream-logic environmental hazard. It's impossible to tell without taking the risk of following one. Unlike with other foes, the GM rolls the reaction check in secret and does not reveal the intentions of the allicere encountered.

Back to Manifest

AKA Stigmaling

Wretched, puking floppy maggots with weakly grasping arms and human faces about the size of a man's foot, foedatus are embodiments of secret shames. Utterly pathetic, foedatus are easily defeatable so long as you don't let one near you. Let one latch on, though, and suddenly they stop being abstract external shames and start being personal to you. To tear it off, then, would be to acknowledge that it even exists in the first place- an unbearable hurdle for most. And so the foedatus latch on and slowly devour their victims, who die filled with self-loathing. This is why you should always bring a friend when you travel to the Manifest, so they can remove foedatus from you. The light of the sun also burns a foedatus, if you can find it in the Manifest.

Back to Manifest

AKA Boogeyman

Inumbro are shadowy figures that feed off fear, particularly that of children. Most aren't too picky on that point, though, and will happily hunt and destroy any fleshy creature that stumbles into the Manifest. Lucky inumbro that make kills can possess the body of their victim and go on to spread terror in the physical world as well, though this is rare as only psychonauts generally spend enough time in the Manifest to be effectively killable there.

Back to Manifest

AKA Reaper, Death, Soul Collector

Torvus appear like humans at first glance, as widely varied in age, ethnicity and gender as the species they emulate. They are most readily identified from a distance by their mourning attire. Closer up, you might sometimes notice their eyes or the insides of their mouths clouding over into pools of absolute darkness. A torvus never speaks and rarely interferes, save when they feel someone has died an incomplete death or has otherwise unfairly avoided their final fate. They very frequently tangle with inumbro that manage to spill into the real world via possession for this reason, as the torvus seem to perceive this as improper. When a torvus decides to take direct action, they are fearsome and deadly opponents that know no fear or hesitation.

Back to Manifest

The Metro Reef biome is a colossal, vibrant coral reef overgrowing a semi-sunken urban metropolis. Ancient skyscrapers jut out of the ocean shallows, crumbling and overtaken by climbing plants. The first few floors of these “reef towers” are filled with sand and sea creatures, while the upper ones serve as habitat for an array of flying and climbing wildlife. Ancient shipwrecks can sometimes be seen littering the sunken streets. The gillmen are undisputed masters of the land here, and construct lodges both above and below the waterline.

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AKA Pirate, Sharphill Scum

The defection of Captain Sharphill made him the first corsair captain of the Black Horizon, but more were inevitably to follow. Rumors of primitive natives hoarding treasure and fat supply ships loaded with goods bound for the colonies have their own draw to those filled with desperation, greed, or simple bloodlust. Some are defected colonists looking for an easier way to make a living, others new arrivals from Torquetum on privately-chartered boats with a mandate to earn fast profits with a price paid in the blood of the weak.

• Boarder: Agile melee combatant.
• Sharpeye: Ranged gunner.
• Bomber: Throws explosives.

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AKA Hellican

The uncontested apex predator of the metro reef, dropwhoopers are birds with the size, durability, and personality of garbage trucks that nest on the roofs of reef towers and gobble up anything they want from the buffet spread out below. Driving off an unwanted dropwhooper is a tremendous undertaking that usually involves climbing up to its nest and destroying it before welding down a thicket of spikes, forcing it to rebuild elsewhere. Slaying a dropwhooper is an even more arduous undertaking that all but guarantees your induction into the annals of legend.

A dropwhooper's ability to digest almost anything it eats suggests strange alchemies at work in its ponderous stomach, but the evidence that confirms its metabolism as simultaneously dreadful and unearthly is the fact that its droppings are both noxious and highly volatile. Dropwhoopers will sometimes elect to let fly their explosive payload on land-walkers as they soar by to kill or weaken them before swooping in to gobble them up. The fact that a dropwhooper doesn't mind eating things covered in its own shit just adds to their disgusting reputation.

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AKA Zap Fish, Reef Bolter

Elicthyans are reef fish that have evolved a powerful bio-electric pulse for both offensive and defensive use. After shocking their prey (generally smaller fish, but sometimes much larger beasts) into submission, flesh is nibbled away at leisure. The elicthyans have few predators except for the gillmen, who prize them as a delicacy and carefully hunt them with javelins and wooden-handled harpoons.

Back to Metro Reef

AKA Fishman, Merman, Reefman, Stank (offensive)

The gillmen are a race of demihumans native to the Black Horizon with a strictly amphibious life-cycle. Baby gillmen are born with fat, streamlined and tailed bodies. With the onset of puberty a gillman child grows first lungs, then arms and legs while re-absorbing its tail and all of the gill slits between its ribs. An adult gillman maintains only the gills on the sides of their neck. Otherwise adult gillmen are very physically similar to humans in size and stature, but are difficult to mistake for such due to their pale blue-green skin (sometimes featuring stripes), white hair, and enlarged eyes.

Gillman culture is tribal but sedentary, depending mostly on fishing, gathering, and kelp-farming. The inhospitability of the Metro Reef to other demihumans (and indeed, to regular humans) means that with the exception of those who dwell near the shoreline they have few cultural competitors. The second-greatest killer of gillmen behind hostile wildlife is therefore other gillmen, and the tribes are a complex network of wars and alliances.

• Gillman Impaler. Wields a long harpoon.
• Gillman Slinger. Throws javelins.
• Gillman Hyetal. Conjures water for support.

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AKA Hungry Shield, Crunch-Hill

Huge barnacles the size of a man with very slow metabolisms, a headpopper can lay semi-dormant for several years without feeding and then strike like lightning. They tend to grow in clumps near doorways and chokepoints in reef towers and other damp environments, snapping at anything that goes through. More than one unwary traveler has been instantly killed in this manner (via the assassination mechanic) leading to the creature's unfortunately literal name.

Headpoppers can also be difficult to kill, due to their tendency to hide inside their thick outer shells. Area effects are a very effective strategy, but failing that more creative solutions such as decoys or poisoned meat might be required to get past a large number of them. If there's enough room and time to spare, projectiles are useful (but most headpoppers grow in cramped, close areas where it's difficult to stay out of their reach). Engaging in melee is almost always a very poor idea.

Back to Metro Reef

AKA Piranha Lizard, Scaly Shithead

Picodiles are diminutive crocodiles about the length of a man's forearm that exhibit complex social behavior. All picodiles live in groups (called “basks”) of three or more individuals led by an alpha. Those unfamiliar with the creatures who see them laying around in the sun in piles, grooming each other, and looking sleepy might be tempted to believe that they are harmless. This is a terrible mistake, and more than one traveler has lost their lives knee-deep in water surrounded by approaching V-shaped ripples.

Back to Metro Reef

AKA Tower Thief

Reef monkeys live in the upper reaches of reef towers, subsisting on a highly omnivorous diet of insects, shellfish and razor ivy nuts. When threatened, they retreat into that same razor ivy where nothing else can follow without being cut to ribbons. If that doesn't work, they fling themselves off the tower and glide to another one using the loose flaps of skin between their arms and legs.

While rarely aggressive, reef monkeys are notorious thieves and will mercilessly pilfer the camps of those who stop to rest in their domains. While they tend to focus on food stocks, they will also happily cart off anything else that isn't nailed down- shoes, rope, cash, priceless artifacts, whatever. Reef monkeys don't care.

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AKA Dire Otter, Wicked Catsnake

A romper is a man-sized otter that hunts in packs. They occupy a similar ecological niche to wolves in the half-sunken metro reef area, frequently using cooperative tactics to take down larger prey such as shellhounds or trigger sharks. They also will happily prey on humanoids if they outnumber you, so watch out. Rompers are incredibly playful as well as dangerous, and it's not uncommon to see them sliding down steep sandbars and reef towers on their bellies. Some of them have learned to chase fish into gillman nets in exchange for a cut of the catch.

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AKA Faithless Crab, Ocean's Tooth, Salty Reaver

Shellhounds are horse-sized crustaceans that are infamous for both their aggression and stupidity. Many gillman tribes have semi-domesticated a number of shellhounds for use as guardians, food and their exceptionally tough carapaces (for crafting). Unlike many other animals, a shellhound forgets all of its training by the next day and will furiously attack the same handler that has brought it food and shown it affection for years, so the only way to keep shellhounds usefully controllable is through regular administration of psychotropic drugs and beatings. Shellhounds are excellent climbers, which wild specimens use to their advantage by scavenging for food in the upper reaches of reef towers.

Some few people can establish an instant rapport with shellhounds, making them docile with only a few words. These rare individuals are known as “shellhound whisperers” and are highly admired in gillman society. Even a whisperer can't calm down a shellhound that has gone berserk, however.

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AKA Hundred-Eye, Reef Demon, Flesh-Thief

Skimmers are so named because they never touch the ground, at least not while alive. A crackling of energy and eerie blue glow emanates from their underside, holding up a huge circular disk of steel and innumerable waving metal pincers all along its rim. Above that are the eyes, pointing in every direction. If the skimmer has been hunting recently (and most have) its many pincers will be holding the grisly trophies that it came for: arms, legs, heads, torsos. An ear here. A lovely pair of eyes, dangling from their optic nerves.

No one knows why skimmers collect pieces of those it kills, or what criteria it selects for when it tears one piece off a dead body and tosses the remainder aside. No one knows where the skimmers come from, or what place they return to when their hunt is finished. No one knows why skimmers exclusively seem to target humanoids, utterly ignoring everything else. No one knows why skimmers have the severed head of a human in their mechanical hearts inside a frozen glass jar, all wired into its central systems. No one knows a lot about skimmers, because few encounter one and live to tell about it.

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AKA Poison Pie, Stingwiggle

Big starfish covered in semi-mobile spikes filled with mild neurotoxin. Thorncrawlers are mostly mindless scavengers whose slow movement allows for easy evasion, but they can be dangerous to the unwary or crippled reef explorer. Properly prepared, they can also be delicious. Improperly prepared, they are even more deadly than when alive.

Thorncrawlers often live solitary lives by necessity, due to the fact that they are not immune to each others' thorns. The one exception is the annual breeding season, where all thorncrawlers shed their spines and start growing soft, rubbery new ones while excitedly congregating together into disturbing starfish orgies.

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AKA Hosehead, Reef Spitter

Large reef fish with mouths full of fangs, a trigger shark's most notable feature is the inflatable pouches on either side of its face. By filling these pouches with water, poking its head above the surface, and carefully expelling all of the held liquid at once a trigger shark creates a brief stream of water powerful enough to knock land-dwelling creatures flying, preferably down into the water where they can be torn into meat-chunks. Though reef monkeys clambering about far above the surface of the water are their favored prey, trigger sharks have also been known to blow fishermen out of their boats with much the same result.

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“Undercroft” is a generic name for the many tunnels, caverns and other spaces underneath the surface of the earth (both natural and man-made). Many Undercroft creatures are completely adapted to the dark, while others live in the edge habitat between the Undercroft and the world of light above.

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AKA Stomach Jelly, Digester, Underscrubber

Cthonocytes are large, amorphous single-cell organisms coated in highly acidic slime that creep slowly and aimlessly through the Undercroft feeding on filth and organic matter. While they leave a spotlessly clean trail in their wake, a cthonocyte itself is absolutely crammed with dirt and decaying bits of matter in the process of being digested or excreted, making them a mottled brownish-green color similar to vomit. Rarely a cthonocyte in a clean habitat will assume its natural semi-transparent color, allowing adventurers to see through its skin to the nucleus and other organelles floating inside it. Cthonocytes eagerly seek out fresher organic material whenever possible, and the creature's lack of a brain or ability to feel pain mean there's no reasoning with a hungry one or driving it off. Sunlight rapidly kills them, though, so they rarely become a problem above the surface.

Juvenile cthonocytes are too small to engulf and absorb much of anything, but are more energetic than their adult form. While sometimes encountered in small groups together feasting on cave moss or a rotting carcass, most encounters with juveniles will happen when an adult spawns them in combat.

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AKA Cheesehead

Curdies are eyeless humanoid dwellers of the Undercroft whose withered, mutated bodies are constantly covered in a thin sheen of grease and mold. Their fermented flesh smells strongly like rotting cheese, leading to their name (and causing many adventurers that face them to swear off dairy for a while). It is unknown whether curdies have any sort of language, culture or society (as no signifiers of such have ever been discovered) but it is definitely known that they crawl about in feral swarms and eagerly tear apart anything fleshy that crosses their path without actually eating any of it. When they die, they collapse noiselessly into rotting chunks of fermented meat and blooms of spores. When they enter sunlight, they die much more spectacularly in gushing flame and thin, high shrieks.

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AKA Stone Eel, Goddess Parasite

Drillworms are writhing things of synthetic muscle and hard-edged steel that use their whirling, buzzing heads to bore the species' signature holes through rock. Drillworms are perhaps the single largest environmental factor that shapes the Undercroft; many of the great caverns and tunnels that serve as habitat for most other Undercroft wildlife are the locations of former drillworm nests. On the other hand, the destructive worms can spell disaster for the long-term structural stability of an area. More than one cave-in has been caused by excessive drillworm activity, and the discovery of a nest can be enough to cause a massive shutdown of all nearby mining operations.

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AKA Wraith Shark

Ghost stories can be heard around every campfire and in every inn's common room across the Empire- tales of the dead who refuse to sleep peacefully, rising up again from their graves to prey upon the living. No human ghost has ever been definitively proven to exist, and so many believe these stories to be only stories. This makes it all the more bizarre when an eidolodon is encountered far beneath the surface, bound to the vicinity of its long-fossilized remains. Why would ancient sharks dead for millions of years so readily attain ghosthood while human graveyards remain silent? More than one researcher has gone to the deep dark places of the earth to find out. None have come back, alive or dead.

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AKA Hungry Darkness, Black Ghost

The uneasy feeling of being watched. The scrabbling, clicking sound of claws on stone. And, of course, the raspy cry from which the creature gets its name: “Gruuuuuuuuu… gruuuuuuu…”. These are both the only warnings adventurers beneath the earth will have of the presence of a grue, and the only things we know about the creature at all. This is because a grue is literally unknowable- wander into the dark and it's on you like a rending gale, but shine a light on it and you'll see only a torn and broken corpse with no trace of the beastly killer. No wonder some people think they're ghosts. Fortunately, grues are easy to keep at bay if you bring a torch and someone to watch your back… just don't let the light go out.

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AKA Dungeon Ration

The result of ancient genetic engineering, sausage beasts are squat, rather homely looking things that grow sausage-like boneless lumps of highly nutritious protein and fat where a normal creature would grow a tail. This combined with the beast's ability to subsist on nearly any sort of organic matter (most frequently algae blooms and slime patches) makes them a keystone Undercroft ecological species and a major boon to adventurers lost in the dark. A sausage beast is largely unharmed by the loss of their tail as they can simply grow another one given enough time. In fact, most sausage beasts lose their tails with shocking regularity to various creatures higher up on the food chain than themselves.

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AKA Chud, Goblin, Morlock

Trogs are humanoids that subsist through raiding the surface from their dens in the Undercroft. Trogs look much like exceptionally pale-skinned humans, blond and blue-eyed with mouths full of fangs. The life of a trog is nasty, brutish and generally short. They live in small bands and tribes that constantly split and merge, with the leader generally being whichever trog is the biggest. They maintain large numbers despite their high death rate via an equally high birth rate- the birth of the typical trog litter of around twenty babies is never survived by the mother, and frequently she serves as her childrens' first meal.

This is not to say that trogs are unintelligent. In fact, nearly the opposite is true; trogs frequently possess a fiendish cleverness for traps, weapons and other implements of murder and cruelty. Trogs are not hideous, either- hose one off and make them sit up straight and you'd have a strikingly beautiful humanoid. Trogs say that this is because they are the true inheritors of the earth, superior specimens on a fast track to ascendency. This doesn't keep them from killing and raiding each other as much as they do the surface-dwellers, however, and that might be the only thing proving them wrong.

• Viper. Agile close-quarters fighter with a poisoned blade.
• Flamer. Heavy hitter holding a flamethrower.
• Gunslinger. Firearm specialist that attacks at range.

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AKA Wretchling

They stumble through the empty darkness, sobbing softly to themselves. Why do they cry? Some say because their stunted little bodies are so hideous that they hate themselves for it, and that would certainly explain why they cannot bear to be seen and scatter before our torches. Some say they weep because they remember a lost world of antiquity where they were worshipped as gods, now gone forevermore. Most believe that they weep because they are so tired of living, and yet cannot ever die. The weepers never say. They only scream when we meet them, and scuttle away.

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