Endless Blue - Week 37.4 - The Kelpygmies: Primatives of the Kelp Forests

Botany

The Kelpygmies-- Primitives of the Kelp Forests

Much has been made of the civilized races, and even those relegated to the primitive races have made their mark on the cultures of the Known World.  But there a tiny few other races -- more primordial and archaic that the primitives races -- that have begun to influence life in the ocean of Elqua.

Kelpygmy

Small Plant
Hit Dice: 1d8 (4 hp)
Initiative: +2
Speed: 30 ft. (6 cubes)
Armor Class: 16 (+1 size, +2 Dex, +3 natural), touch 13, flat-footed 14
Base Attack/Grapple: +0/-4
Attack: Claw +1 melee (1d4) or longspear +1 melee (1d6, crit x3)
Full Attack: 2 claws +1 melee (1d4) or longspear +1 melee (1d6, crit x3)
Space/Reach: 5 ft./5 ft. (10 ft. with longspear)
Special Attacks: —
Special Qualities: Damage reduction 5/piercing, immunity to bludgeoning, immunity to electricity, low-light vision, plant traits, ultravision
Saves: Fort +2, Ref +2, Will +0
Abilities: Str 11, Dex 14, Con 11, Int 6, Wis 10, Cha 10
Skills: Hide +11, Listen +3, Move Silently +7, Spot +3
Feats: Alertness, Hide in Plain Sight, Trackless Scent
Environment: Kelp Forests of the Shore and Shoals
Organization: Gang (2-5) or attack party (4-7 + 1 shaman, and possibly 1 shambling mound)
Challenge Rating: 1/2
Treasure: Standard
Alignment: Always neutral
Advancement: By character class (see below).
Level Adjustment: —

Kelpygmy morphology follows the piscean form in miniature, with lengths of only 2 and a half to four feet long.  They possess a torso with two arms and two pelvic fins, which then tappers down from the hips into a tail like a fish.  Their skin has a strange, olive-colored, waxy rind-like texture, as if they were vegetables molded into piscean form, and sport circles of leafy tendrils ringed around their waist, wrists, and tail flukes.  A tuft of this same brownish seaweed is tied in a topknot at the apex above their heads, which house a pair of glossy green eyes and a wide mouth filled with blocky, clumsily arranged teeth.  Their four fingered hands are tipped with small yet sturdy thorns that act as claws that are quite adept at rending kelp nautiluses apart.  Examination of kelpymy bodies reveal they have no ears, yet in-the-field evidence points strongly to the fact they can most certainly hear with acuity.  They also have the gill slits that pisceans do, but lack the internal skeletal and organ systems to support they function.

Kelpygmies are a recent occurrence, having sprung up suddenly in the last few years.  Almost nothing is known for sure about them other than they are cunning, dangerous, and hate piscean life.  They are not carnivores, and do not attack pisceans for food.  Attempts at finding kelpygmy settlements have failed utterly, usually ending in either the searching party being slain to the last piscean, or with the pursued plant-things disappearing before their eyes.  It is concluded that the race has not developed shelter yet, and blindly wander the currents, living off the land like migratory animals.

The habitat of the kelpygmy is estimated to range from the Tropic of Kraken through to the Tropic of Cetacean.  Environments further north or south seem to be too cold for the liking of the pygmies.

Kelpygmies do not posses a complex language.  What passes for their native tongue, called Pygmit,  is a handful of iconic words with little in the way of conjugation.  Ideas require repetition, and frequently punctuated wit  thumps to their chest or striking their spears on coral, stone, or other hard surface.  If not for the species intrinsic hatred for piscean life, study of their burgeoning language would provide incredible insight into the origin of speech in other cultures.

As an illiterate culture, kelpygmies may only gain levels in barbarian, druid, or packbreeder.  Packbreeder pygmies learn the secret of bending shambling mounds to their will, while those that follow the druid path become shaman.  The bulk of kelpygmies become barbarians, with the most advance warrior becoming the group's chieftan.

Combat

The kelpygmy have begun a campiagn of border incurssions on rural farmlands, slaying all pisceans in the area and leaving their corpses unweighted to rise to the Vastness.  This aggressively territorial behavior has made the species extremely difficult to deal with, and as a result most treat the kelpygmies as immediate threats to safety.  Luckily the backwards species is not organized enough to pose a significant threat to the security the major nations.

Attacking kelpygmies utilize either their thorny claws or simplistic weapons, usually a longspear in the form of a sharpened stick.  Favoring ambush strategies that rival the guerrilla tactics of the Ceph ambushers, they escape detection by using their natural coloration to blend with the kelp-choked surroundings.  Often times they will use the wildlife around them to their benefit, either luring the victim towards a predator, or vice versa.

Damage Resistance to Piercing Weapons (Ex): The thick rind that comprises the skin of the kelpygmy not only grants them a high natural armor, but also resists the damage dealt by piercing weapons.

Immunity to Bludgeoning Weapons (Ex): The same damage resistant skin prevents the kelpygmy from taking damage from a bludgeoning weapon.

Electrical Immunity (Ex): Kelpygmy are utterly non-conductive, and any electricity-based spell or attack will not include them as possible targets.

Trackless Scent (Ex): As plants, the kelpygmy leave no scent trail behind in natural surrounds, and cannot be tracked unless they willingly leave a trail.

Skills: Kelpygmies have a +4 racial bonus on Hide and Move Silently checks.  Their coloration so accutely matches that of the local vegetation that they can blend in seemlessly.  The do not need to seek out the shadows to hide, disappearing instantly in the kelp beds.

Kelpygmies are ill suited as player characters.  There are no kelpygmies with enough higher cognizance to overcome their instinctive loathing of other pisceans.  Their behavior is absolute, and it is doubtful that they will ever be able to become civilized unless all other sentient life is wiped out first.  A few stupid packbreeders, seduced by images of domesticated servitude, have attempt to capture and breed kelpygmies.  The result has always been the swift disappearance of the pygmy and the murder of the breeder.  Not even the slave-trading Yaun-Teel, with their sadistic methods of helotry, have been able to keep a kelpygmy in captivity.

"Like the kelp they hide in, these primitives should be reaped for the sake of progress..."
-- a common sentiment about the Kelpymies of the Endless Blue.

Endless Blue - Week 36.2 - Undead Sargasso: Twisted in Vine and Soul

Botany

The Undead Sargasso: Twisted in Vine and Soul


Undulating waves ripple over the expansive oceans of Elqua, a never ending rise and fall of water, pulled in contrary directions by the criss-crossing orbits of dark Urowes, steady Ymaris, and distant Oberus.  Its surface is a frothing, rippling rind of crystal-clear tropical waters, vibrant blooming clouds of rhodoarchea algae, and free-floating patches of sargassum.  The swirling intermix sapphire blue, jasper red, and hazel enstatite paints a whorling, curling seascape in watercolor.  But despite this beauty, there exists a malignant suppuration like a leprosotic seeping wound.

Sargasso are drifting patches of botonical growths that have clumped together like a blanket of plant-life.  A chaotic twisting of flotsam, sargassum, and other debris, these patches bob and ebb on the cresting surf.  They are usually more of a nuisance than anything else, as they block out the sunlight from even the shallowest areas of the Shore and few productive animals can digest their cellulose leaves.

The sargassum  plant itself is a brownish-green, limp algea with small nodules, pale and waxy, budding close to the stem that serve as the plant's method of flotation, producing lighter-than-water gasses and concentrating them in a small space.  When the tiny berry-like lumps are crushed, the released tension creates a cracking sound, like bone being broken, and the escaping gasses are usually noxious.

The sargassum can clump together quickly and easily, and have been known to grow almost as long as an Orcan, and in these sufficient amounts can even  entangle the strongest Orcan in its twirling fibers.  Drifts of gulfweed can be found everywhere on the surface of Elqua's oceans, floating passively, belying the horrors it hides just below the water's surface.  But these are natural phenomena, a balance part of the world's hydraulic ecosystem.  It is the tainted gulfweed, the undead sargasso, that is a mar upon the crown jewel of Elqua.

Most dead bodies will tend to float to the ocean’s surface unless there is significant structural damage that compromises whatever method of buoyancy it utilized while alive.  This is usually the dispersal of gasses in special bladders.  But upon the cessation of life, the process of decomposition quickly manifests, and this mundane chemical reaction produces a prodigy of lighter-than-water vapors that saturate the corpse's flesh.   This is what produces the bloated look of cadavers, and the ravages of caustic seawater and scavenging necrophages only heighten the revilement.

Bodies that are not consigned to the depths, to sink eternal in the cooling, encompassing embrace of the sea and become one with the Source risk becoming lost to their eternal reward.  Without the time honored traditions of weighting that most pisceans adhere to, a body will rise to the surface where it usually becomes a smorgasbord for surface abominations that will quickly pick the bones clean, if not swallow the remains whole.  But sometimes those floating corpses run afoul of a patch of sargassum and become entwined in the slick gulfweed, limbs wrapped with seaweed, in turn wrapping around more seaweed.  That in itself is not dire, were it not for the inexplicable change that comes next.

Tiny worm-like roots of the coiling vine slowly bury into the rancid flesh of the dead, growing longer through skin and muscle, forming a chlorophyllic nervous system.  The roots leech nutrients from the decomposing organs, the miasma of rotting flesh saturating the effluvium-filled pods of the sargasso, turning it toxic, churning the substances, mixing them into a morass of gasses that radiate with negative energy that slowly corrupt the dead into aberrations, into "undead".

Most corporeal undead -- the majority of which are zombies and ghouls -- will float, either by their own vapor-laden corpses or the tight entrapment of tangling gulfweed.   Over the centuries enough untended, forgotten, or simply abandoned bodies have risen to the surface of the waters where, bobbing like a cork buoy, have drifted together, almost as if attracted by others of its grisly kind.  An immense number have collected in a floating sargasso of leathery tentacles and bony fingers, unrelenting ravenous hunger and unceasing hiemal cold, reaching out to destroy the tiniest glimmer of life, the smallest flicker of warmth, or just any moving thing within its life-sapping grasp.

The largest of the undead sargassos floats stationary over the Maw, an ever present eclipse and it littered with the bodies of both slaughtered piscean and eviscerated Kraken.  It overshadows the ruins of the Kraken Empire in a perpetual twilight of thick color and gelid waters.  It is said some of the gulfweed here bristle with unspent eldritch energy, cast off magicks of the Kraken during the Occupation.  As if there were not enough reasons to avoid the blockaded area, the threat of long forgotten spells triggering at random should be enough to terrorize even the most stalwart explorer.

Occasionally individual bodies break off from the tangled patch and become free roaming undead.  Severe storms are generally the culprit, with the frothing tidal waves smashing down on the otherwise motionless patches.  The worst is the yearly appearance of the Maelstrom over the Creche of Civilization, when enough damage can be done to the physical integrity of an undead to rupture its putrid flesh, releasing the entombed gasses that held it aloft and send the aberration plummeting to the bottom of the sea.  There, with scraps of ectoplasmic sargassum clinging to its lethargic limbs, it will wander the silt ocean floor seeking to feast upon the energies of life.  But roaming zombies or ghouls are not the end of the potential horrors, as incorporeal undead can develop as well, and unlike their clumsier cousins, they retain their swiftness through the currents just as if they still felt their heartbeat pulsing through their muscles as they swam.  Banshees are a well known form of incorporeal undead amongst the Orcans, formed from the unconsecrated remains of a Versesinger.

"The Departed allowed to float upward, ascending into the evil of the Vastness,
will become tangled in sargasso. There, trapped in body, expelled in soul,
basking in the torment of unresolved reward, their twisted souls surrender
and become the Lost..."