Endless Blue - Week 51 - Cattel of the Fluid Nations: Barnard's Swallower

Zoology

Cattel of the Fluid Nations: Barnard's Swallower

NOTE: The images and ideas presented here are copyright Alex Ries and based on his Barnard's Swordswallower concept, except for material previously posted in the Endless Blue campaign setting blog.  The use Alex's work here is not meant as an infringement of those rights, and is used without permission.  It does not qualify as Open Game Content as per the OGC document.  If you enjoyed what you have read/seen here, please visit Alex's website at http://www.alexries.com, his blog at http://exozoo.blogspot.com, and his DeviantArt page at http://abiogenisis.deviantart.com.

Barnard's Swallower

Gargantuan Aberration (Aquatic)
Hit Dice: 4d8 +4 (22 hp)
Initiative:
Speed: 20 feet (4 cubes)
Buoyancy: Shoals (adjustable)
Armor Class: +1
Base Attack/Grapple: -3/+13
Attack: Water Slap (1d8 points of subdual damage)
Full Attack: Water Slap (1d8 points of subdual damage)
Space/Reach: 40 ft./5 ft.
Special Attacks: Net
Special Qualities: None
Saves: Fort +1, Ref +2, Will +4.
Abilities: Str 10, Dex 12, Con 13, Int 2, Wis 9, Cha 8
Skills: Hide -5, Search +7, Spot +7, Survival +7
Feats: Improved Grab, Improved Natural Armor, Snatch,  Tracescent
Environment: Temperate, open waters (Shoals)
Organization: Solitary or mating pairs.
Challenge Rating: 1/2
Treasure: None, other than body parts.
Alignment: Always neutral.
Advancement: Young (1HD), Juvenile (2-3 HD), Adult (4 HD)
Level Adjustment: -

A Barnard's Swallower, shown with its "mouth" open and about to feed.

The Swallower is an ubiquitous example of packbreeder success.  It has been credited with domestication by the Barnard family as far back as the Bronze Age, and has served alongside the various piscean species consistently ever since.  Its relatively robust health makes it ideal for areas of temperature extremes such as those in the arctics or tropics, where it fares only slightly less well than in temperate waters.  Thoroughly domesticated, swallowers that are let loose into the wild or wander away from safer currents quickly fall prey to native predators.  Their ability to survive on their own has subsequently been bred out of them as their role as livestock as been bred into them.  The wild swallower has since all but been hunted to extinction by the indigenous races of the Known World.

Approximately 40 feet long from tip of sail to end of net, the Swallower is most notable for its distinctive knife-shape trunk and crop.  The trunk has about the same degree of flexibility as that of a Mer's spine, and trails a ventral fin from tip to neck.  Its epidermis is a blubbery, resilient skin that is a mottled slate grey along the dorsal side and a pale bluish-white along the belly.  A series of six paired openings along the trunk are the gills of the beast.

Barnard's Swallower coloration.

Swallowers are hermaphoditic, with a reproductive system that both provides and receives genetic material.  When the mating season begins, swallowers congregate in wide, open waters and release their seed packets into the currents where hopefully another swallower will swim through the plume of sperm and collect enough to become impregnated.  Self-impregnation seems to be biologically impossible due to the creature's own immune system.  But it is expressly due to this "pollination" method of reproduction that piscean selection could begin the animals'  slow alteration from wild beast to domesticated livestock.

Combat

The swallower is a docile beast, slow to move and relatively weak despite its size.  It makes a poor beast of burden; instead its value to piscean settlements is as livestock.

The ventral fin acts in many ways like a keel, and undulates in a rippling wave to produce forward momentum, much like the fins on the side of a squid.  Normally the eddies created in the currents from this motion would scatter prey in proximity, but the swallower developed a hunting skill to account for this -- it will snap the fin in a strong, sharp swat, effectively smacking small prey with a wall of water.  While their senses are overloaded from the impact of the water, the swallower can scoop them up in its net.  Few so buffeted can collect their wits again before they are engulfed.  Their main diet is comprised of great gulps of plankton that are easily found in the blooming open waters of Elqua, supplemented by the occasional small fish or other animal unfortunate enough to be caught in the Swallower's uniquely evolved digestive system.

Internal Anatomy of the Barnard's Swallower

The bulbous portion hanging down from the "blade" is the animal's digestive system, which parts open in much the same way a bivalve clamshell does.  When it does open, it releases a sheer, billowing "net" anchored to thin limb-like protrusions.  This fine fibered netting is organic in nature -- a silk derived from glands lining the Swallower's bulb -- and is used as a sieve to filter the animal's preferred meal stock from the ocean's currents: plankton.  Much like the massive whales, the gargantuan Swallower is dependent on one of the tiniest species of life for its continued survival.

Living creatures are pushed into this organic colander due to the disruptive currents of the Swallowers fin, where they are caught against the slime covered net.  This mucus is constantly being secreted while the net is inside the Swallower's bulb, and is slightly acidic due to the collection of enzymes that give it the tacky qualities that trap its prey.  As the chemical reactions from the enzymes break down the trapped food, it sloughs down the netting in the form of a nutrient rich nectar, perfectly prepared for digestion.

When the net is closed again, the joint seen at the back of the Swallower bends under the bulb.  There the briny bouillabaisse pools over what constitutes the creatures actual mouth.  An esophageal tube runs back up the back of the Swallower's net limbs, carrying the pre-digested catch to the stomach proper.  The connective netting between the folding limbs is a natural forming silk, that allows water to strain through the membrane but keep its plankton catch intact.  The enzymic acid it excretes to dissolve its prey also wears away at this silk, so the netting is in a constant state of repair.

The Swallower's net grab does not inflict damage.  Instead, it slowly excrete enzymes that kill prey collected in its net.  Treat the enzyme as an Acid.  It can Snatch Large or smaller creatures in its net.

Circulatory System of the Barnard's Swallower

Despite it grand size, the Swallower has an easily mappable circulatory system.  A series of veins and arteries transport the blood over the animal's body by means of small sac-like organs at the base of each gill.  These are primitive hearts, muscular pumps providing the pressure to move blood to needy organs.  Exhausted blood is circulated through the gills by means of small vascular loops.  Due to its lethargic lifestyle, the ponderous beast lacks a powerful central heart like pisceans possess, and as a result over-stimulation has been known to make the creatures faint.  This makes them easy prey in the wild.

Nervous System of the Barnard's Swallower

The neural network of a Swallower is unsurprisingly primitive.  It is of no revelation that the animal has never demonstrated any form of higher thinking skills, despite the best efforts of numerous packbreeders to create a better, smarter Swallower.  At best the nervous system can essentially maintain the creature's autonomic systems functioning.  The most complex thought processes the animal can achieve is feeding and movement, and not always at the same time.  It accomplishes nature's evolutionary requirements, and nothing more, spurring the piscean phrase "dumb as a swallower" for anyone or thing that barely functions above a comatose state.

The intent of selectively breeding Swallowers has results in various fields.  Resources scavenged from a Swallower are:  enzymes for alchemists, silk for weavers, skin for tanning, even meat for eating.

Rumor has it that a tribe of Locanth nomads has begun a concerted effort to re-introduce the Swallower to the wild.  Their packbreeders are attempting to breed self-reliance and animal instinct back into the creatures in order to restore the previously wild version to the shoals of the Gulf of Locanth.

"It is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission, but seldom is it less risky..."
-- Sensate rationalization for many of their indulgences.

Endless Blue - Week 50 - The Recurring Storm: The Maelstrom

Meteorology

The Recurring Storm: The  Maelstrom

The skies of Elqua are a tranquil swath of blue, should any piscean throw aside their generations of fear and simply glimpse above the surf.  Occasional languid streaks of cloud break up the hypnotizing expanse of cyan above that mirrors the undulating endless blue below.  Storms are rare, with precipitation falling across the dotted isles like sudden, soft breezes.  But not all the weather is kind, and the exists a strange mega-storm that has raked the world for as long as there has been water -- the Maelstrom.

This huge hurricane that has persisted on the face of the world for millennia, slowly dragging around the planet in a haphazard, drunken course.  Its direction at the whim of currents, both air and sea, it meanders across the globe, making one revolution every year.  So regular is this rotation that there is one additional week added to the Elquan calendar, specifically signifying the one constant speck of behavior the natives can predict, namely the five days that the Maelstrom crosses the shallow shoals known as the Creche of Civilization.  Except for that foreseeable week, the tempest defies charting, its course never the same except for the inevitable period where it seems determined to traverse the Creche of Civilization.

Anatomy of a Tempest

Study of the the Maelstrom is foolishness to the extreme.  The shear size of the hurricane's whirling shape, the flensing winds capable of flaying flesh from bone, its torrential currents whipping the breath of water from the gills.  No fearless piscean could go near it; no sane one would want to.  But if a soul dared, if a solitary inquisitive mind set itself to study the esoteric cyclone, what they might espy would forever haunt and humiliate them.

There, towering over the scattered islands and volcanic outcropping hovers a discus so immense it astonishingly stretches across a whole eight degrees of longitude.  Its cyclonic winds scrabbling at the air, stealing the moisture in the form of faint wisps of water vapor, its hungry gyre swallowing them greedily.  If not for the collection of these few streaks of opacity over the geologic history of Elqua, the Maelstrom would be invisible in the Vastness.  Due to the scarcity of haze and fog, the Maelstrom does not blanket the atmosphere in a thick coating of cloud.  Instead, the storm is naked, bared to the dark, ever-present night that glowers in the deep Vastness beyond the blue world of water.  If any piscean could look down from there and gaze back at the planet of their origin, they would see the strangest sight... an octagon of churning weather on the face of Elqua.

The Octagon on Elqua

The funnel cloud sprawls from the reaches of the upper atmosphere down to the rolling surface of the world's ocean,  where the sub-aqueous portion then breaks through the tumultuous waves, plunging below to the bottom of the abyssal floor.  The nadir of the hurricane drags across the ocean floor, sifting through the silt of the seabeds, upturning natural undersea flora and muddying the currents in its devastating wake.

The turbulence, the chaos created by the storm agitates the waters, inserting random variance and kinetic potential into the placid waters of Elqua.  Perhaps that very same disturbance of the waters gave life the spark of impetus to evolve from the primordial oceans.  Maybe it brought about the impetus for the direly needed variation in weather that the shallow ocean basin of the waterworld required to foster the diversification of life, to bolster its spread from out of the safe haven of the Creche of Civilization and outward into the Endless Blue.  For as much damage and woe that the tempest illicit, the rampaging force of nature may have brought about the existence of higher life on Elqua.

The storm front known as the Maelstrom is not a single hurricane, but in truth a group of eight smaller twisters, themselves rotating into a greater tempest.  Eddies in the atmosphere from the conglomerated storms forms an octagonal shape.  The barometric shear blurs the outward currents together, and with the bulge of each individual storm's eye enforcing the shape, appears as an octogram.

Wave-like instabilities crept up, rogue eddies circulating, tempest-tossed spirals trapped between the tranquil waters within the Maelstrom's eye and the faster current streams counter-rotating around the storm.  These form the geometric outline of the tempest's whorled winds.

The eye of the Maelstrom -- the column of low pressure air around which the cyclonic gyre spirals -- is calm and clear of cloud cover.  The waters are strangely still, a twenty-five mile wide limpid pool of water that seems to float across the globe as if cradled in the massive hands of the storm.  The surrounding whirlwinds reach up to 200 miles per hour, but the silence in the eye is eerily quiet, as if the air itself were petrified and unmovable.  The pooled water here dips a few feet lower than sea level outside the Maelstrom, and looking up from this vantage point has the viewer gazing through a humongous tunnel of shadowed clouds, its walls silently spinning and undulating downward as the eye of the beholder slowly pans upward for miles, until it finally breaks out into a tiny circle of pale blue.  If not for the fearsome forces screaming around the eye like a banshee, the eye would actually be quite serene.

The Path of Strife

There is no mean, median, or usual path for the Maelstrom's advance across the face of the globe.  It only has the most vague of limits, the most ephemeral of laws.  Foremost among those is the fact that it always, always travels along the surface of the water, never making landfall or cutting across dry land.  And despite whatever whim or variance the storm has followed, it will always return to the Creche of Civilization for the five days that mark the passing of one year and the birth of another.

"Bigger torrents have smaller torrents,
That leech off their strife;
And little torrents form stable currents,
a stressful way of life..."
-- The Recurring Storm, Introduction.

Endless Blue - Week 37.1 - Hue of Flesh and Shade of Scale

Geneology

Hue of Flesh and Shade of Scale

The diversity of life in the water of Elqua has blossomed over the epochs into a complex ecology of living beings.  The piscean races are not immune to the glacial drift of geneology, the passage of traits from one generation unto its children.  The most visual of these inherited traits, the color of skin, of scale, of hair, help define the various ethnicities of the Fluid Nations.  As son resembles father, as cousins share more in common than strangers, societies of species share certain visual resemblances that mark them for the tribe that spawned them.  These chromatic clues, or coloration, are consistent to any given species, and in many cases are one of the dominant factors in identifying race.

Piscean Complexions

The matrix below charts the most currently establish credentials for ethnicity in the Known World.  Each row across corresponds to one race:  In this case, the Cetaceans, the Chelon, the Lumulus, two rows for Mer, and so on.  Each sphere in the row represents a different ethnicity, with its own unique coloration, that is passed down to their offspring.  These are the sub-races.  They are minor cosmetic differences that set it apart from other ethnic variations, yet still similar enough genetically to allow interbreeding.  The final column represents individual from the race that were trapped in the Undertow, and through time have lost the coloration pigments in their epidermis and have become albino.  Victims of the Undertow, an over powering vortex in the Abyss of the Chelon Sea, suffer from this achromatosis, though albinic offspring are not unheard of in the waters above.

Each sphere represents an individual ethnicity, and the coloration inside is a loose approximation of the prevalent pigmentation of the species.  The shade and hue can vary to a certain degree, but the basic coloration is the same.  Red may express itself as pale rose in one and as a darkened crimson in another, but is always some cast of red.

Decoding the Matrix

Indetification Key for the Colorization Heraldry

The sphere is the broken down into the dorsal color (the crescent shape) and the ventral color (the oval shape).   These represent the coloration of the back and front of a piscean, respectively.  For example, Orcan coloration is distinct, with their backs the classic black expanse and their chest the striking white.  Not all species have a different colloration along their belly as along their spine, or the change in color is a continuously gradual fade.  In these cases, the full sphere serves as the body's coloration and the belly oval is neglected.

The three circles within the sphere represent the markings.  Marking are patterns or shapes distinct from the dorsal and ventral coloration.  Thins like spots, stripes, and other patterns are perfect examples.  The uppermost cirlce is the Primary Marking,  This circle represents the coloring of a marking that is shared across the race, regardless of intermingling.  Every Orcan has the white spot on either side of their head, though the shape and size of that spot vary from individual to individual.  Likewise, while the color of the primary marking is consistent, the shape or pattern of the marking is a unique family trait that is inherited from the parents and slightly modified through genetic drift.

The next circle is the Secondary Marking.  These secondary markings, if any, are not frequently expressed across the whole race, but are specific to a family tree.  They do not define what it means to be of a particular sub-race, but is more akin to having "his father's gills but his mother's eyes".  In cases of mixed parentage, where the mother and father come from different ethnicities, the coloration of the dominant parent trait would be the primary marking, and the other parents' marking would become the secondary marking.  This is especially common among the Mer, who despite the most distinctive and vibrant coloration of all the piscean races, inter-marry as suits them.  To represent this, the secondary and potential third markings are left as hollow circlets, for the player to decide upon during character creation.

The final circle is tertiary markings.  Such markings are rare, but do surface, especially in families renown for their wanderlust as young adults and falling in love with the local pisceans.

Primary, secondary, or tertiary markings filled with a spectrum signify the species has the ability to alter the pigmentation in their skin, be it purposefully or passively, to other color(s),  The Ceph, masters of camouflage, are capable of producing any mixture of dorsal, ventral, and marking coloration.  A transluscent spectrum marking, like the secondary marking of a Kouton, signifies that while pigmentation changes may occur, they will not alter the basic shape and distribution of the markings.  This is the Kouton "blush", the flushing of the skin with certain colors that reflect the emotional state of the individual, but the pattern/shape of the markings still shows through the colored tint.  For markings that only occur on the dorsal or ventral side, such as with the deduced coloration of the extinct Icht, the portion that overlaps the crescent or oval is occluded.

Some colorizations and mottling have notable histories attached to them, and as a result have been given names.  These famous colorations take on a meaning of their own, and serve as the heraldry for the family, used on flags and on aegises pledged to their cause.  These are the standards that wave in the currents over great armies, clashing tooth, claw, and blade to decided the future of their bodies of water.  They bring fame; the bestow fame.  They attract loyalty of the common piscean, and demand that loyalty be returned.  In many ways, the color of a normally detached, civilized, evolved piscean is still slave to their baser instincts, driven by visually triggered biology to prefer that which is pleasing to the eye.  This fact is not lost on those that use power, and they cultivate their colorization's social image with great care.