Beasts of the Provinces#
Every province says its beasts are the worst. Moria's the only one telling the truth, and it's still wrong, because it's never been under the Bleak.
Known by name
The animals on the other pages are found all over. These are the ones people in a particular place warn you about: the hill-lions of Amari, the rimefang wolves of New Saellem, and the things that live in the dark under the Bleak.
In a fight a creature’s AC is its Defense, and it adds a fifth of its level to hit. Running a Fight has the rest.
Reading this page#
Each beast gives its rank and level, its health, armor class and bite, and where it’s met. These are single, well-known creatures and the kind of thing found in one place, so they don’t come in groups unless the place says so. Their numbers are worked out from the level and rank the game gives them, on the same scale as the animals.
Storytellers first
These creatures are written for the places they guard, and some descriptions give a place’s secrets away. Players may want to read no further than their own party’s next stop.
On Sedia#
The provinces of Sedia, north to south.
New Saellem#
- Rimefang wolf
Health 196 · AC 16 · Bite 1d20 · XP x1.5
A wolf of the Rimefield, long-legged and white, bigger than any wolf of the south and lean as a whip, with frost caught in its ruff and teeth that have cracked caribou bone all winter. The cold has made the Rimefield’s wolves patient: they will follow a sledge for days, waiting for something to fall off the back.
Amari#
- Ruin spider
Health 6 · AC 6 · Bite 1d4 · XP x0.5
A big, bristling spider grown fat in the undisturbed dark of the fort's collapsed rooms, its webs choking every doorway and stairwell. Harmless enough alone, but the ruins crawl with them, and a careless step into a nest brings the whole skittering mass down at once.
- The Diegan cave-crab
Health 8 · AC 6 · Bite 1d6 · XP x0.5
A pallid, plate-armoured crab the size of a dog, blind and ill-tempered, scuttling the brackish margins of the Diegan pools. They swarm anything that disturbs their dark water, claws snapping for flesh.
- Hill-lion
Health 19 · AC 6 · Bite 1d6 · XP x1
A lean, tawny lion of the maquis shrubland, drawn down from the high hills by the scent of blood from the fighting. Hunger and the reek of carrion have made it bold, and it no longer minds whether its meal is goat or shepherd.
- River spirit
Health 19 · AC 6 · Bite 1d6 · XP x1
A territorial water elemental of the Twin River Flats, risen from the rapids as a coil of cold, glassy water hung with weed and silt. The Amari say the spirits of the Upper and Lower Meaden set these lesser kin to test any who would walk the sacred ground.
- Hinterland bear
Health 21 · AC 7 · Bite 1d6 · XP x1
A massive brown bear of the deep Sitka spruce forest, made bold and bad-tempered by the chaos of an army crashing through its territory. The Amari hinterlands have always tested their elite warriors against such beasts; now the scattered mercenaries have stirred them up against everyone.
- Savanna bull
Health 37 · AC 7 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1.75
A great shaggy bull of the Upper Meaden, shoulders high as a man and crowned with a spread of curved horn the hunters prize above all trophies. Slow to anger and unstoppable once roused, it has gored more young hunters than the elders care to count.
- Greater river spirit
Health 44 · AC 8 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1.75
Both rivers in one towering shape, given will and fury, the greater spirit guards the islet between the arms of the Upper and Lower Meaden. It rises three times the height of a man, a churning pillar of water and light, and it suffers no unproven hand to touch the Sunstone at its heart.
Under the Bleak#
The provinces under the Bleak are dark, old and mostly unexplored, and what lives there has had a long time to get strange.
Narsis#
- Ruin skitterer
Health 12 · AC 6 · Bite 1d4 · XP x1
A plated, many-legged scavenger the size of a hound picks through the rubble, mandibles clicking. It has made a home of the broken ruins and resents company.
- Giant centipede
Health 8 · AC 6 · Bite 1d6 · XP x0.5
An arm-long centipede of the damp lower passages, armoured in chitin and quick to bite, its venom enough to numb a limb. The caverns crawl with them in the wet season, and the Choir's diggings have flushed nests of them out onto the paths.
- Chasm lurker
Health 19 · AC 6 · Bite 1d6 · XP x1
A pale, eyeless chasm lurker the length of a man unfolds from a crack in the wall, its skin slick and translucent over a knot of grasping limbs. It hunts the lightless under-roads by the tremor of a footfall and the warmth of breath.
- Bleak schilla
Health 32 · AC 7 · Bite 1d6 · XP x1.5
A bleak schilla, a spider the size of a man, but where its head should be is a human face, slack and pale, watching. It does not speak aloud; a cold pressure builds behind your eyes when it turns its attention on you. They keep to the old ruins of the deep, and they are patient.
- Cave crawler
Health 21 · AC 7 · Bite 1d6 · XP x1
A pallid, eyeless predator of the upper Narsian caverns, low and many-legged and fast over wet stone. It hunts by vibration and smell, swarming anything warm that disturbs its dark, and the reopening of the cave system has stirred the crawlers up onto the traveled paths.
- Bog leech
Health 25 · AC 8 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1
A black leech the length of a forearm undulates through the standing water, its sucker-mouth ringed with backward-curving teeth. It is fat on whatever has drowned down here.
- The Abaddon spawn
Health 64 · AC 9 · Bite 1d10 · XP x2
The Abaddon spawn, a vast locust-thing, rears in the dark, a man's blind face set above a thicket of clashing mandibles, a scorpion's barbed tail curled over its back. Its wings, when they beat, sound like cavalry charging. The brood-things of the deep call it king.
Vharmas#
- Tunnel slime
Health 9 · AC 5 · Bite 1d4 · XP x1
A massive gelatinous slime oozes across the flooded tunnel floor, its translucent body pulsing with absorbed debris and the occasional bone.
- Llamhigyn
Health 28 · AC 8 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1
A llamhigyn, a limbless toad-bodied thing with a long lizard's tail and ragged membrane wings, hauls itself out of the flood. It leaps and glides on those wings to fall on prey, and the flooded galleries are thick with them where the catacombs meet the deep water.
- Siltback crawler
Health 36 · AC 9 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1
A pale, many-legged crawler the size of a dog, armoured in grey plates that it coats with silt until it looks like a heap of mud. It breeds in the silt banks of the held water behind the great gate of the sluice house, blind, and heaves up out of the mud at the first footfall with its claws open.
- Bleak hydra
Health 80 · AC 10 · Bite 1d12 · XP x2
Nine necks break the black water of the cistern, each ending in a flat venomous head, and the middle head is older and larger than the rest. The hydras are the old guardians of the Bleak; cut one head away and the stump splits and grows two. It does not leave its drowned vault, and it suffers nothing living to leave with what it keeps.
- Conduit adder
Health 40 · AC 10 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1
A blind adder as long as a man is tall, its scales gone the grey-white of the conduit's dry silt, that hunts the dry channel by the warmth of breath. It lies coiled in the open hatches of the clay pipe and the hollows under the channel walls and strikes at anything warm that passes.
- Joint crawler
Health 49 · AC 11 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1
A flat, pale crawler as long as a man's arm and no thicker than a hand, with a fringe of hooked legs down each side and a round mouth like a leech's. It lives in the hairline joints of the Vharmic road, where no mortar fills the gaps, and pours out of the stone toward anything warm that passes.
Korvann#
- Rime crawler
Health 19 · AC 6 · Bite 1d6 · XP x1
A pale, chitin-plated crawler the length of a man, its legs tipped with hooked ice-claws that let it walk the frozen shaft walls. Frost rimes its back, and it breathes a thin fog that hangs in the cold.
- Fracture stalker
Health 28 · AC 8 · Bite 1d8 · XP x1
A long, flat-bodied hunter of the deep fractures, grey as the rock it presses itself into, with too many jointed legs and a jaw that opens sideways. It waits in cracks for warmth to pass and strikes from the wall.
- The Frostwarden
Health 49 · AC 8 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1.75
The Frostwarden is a great figure of fitted ice and dwarven ironwork, raised by the old delvers to guard the deepest vault and never dismissed. Cold pours off it in sheets, and where it sets its feet the stone cracks with frost. Its hollow chest holds a slow blue fire that will not go out.
- Hollowmere skater
Health 75 · AC 13 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1
A pale, long-legged hunter of the Hollowmere's open ice, built like a spider stretched thin: a body no bigger than a hound's slung between eight legs each as long as a spear, tipped with hooked claws that bite into ice. Skaters run in packs across the black ice faster than a horse can gallop, spin frost-stiff webs across the shore caves, and wrap what they catch for later. They used to keep to the middle of the mere. Lately they crowd the western shore.
- Rime borer
Health 120 · AC 13 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1.5
A blind, pale worm as thick as a barrel and as long as a sledge train, ringed with rasping plates of horn that it turns against the ice to bore through it. Rime-borers have tunnelled under the Hollowmere since long before the delvers came, slow and patient, eating the frozen mud for the life in it. Now they bore west in straight lines, fast, and turn on anything in their way.
- Hollowmere matriarch
Health 172 · AC 14 · Bite 1d20 · XP x1.75
The wyrm-mother of the Hollowmere: a frozen wyrm grown old and vast in the hollow beneath the ice, longer than the delvers' sledge trains, her scales gone white as rime and her eyes milky with age. The mere's wyrms are her brood, every one of them, and she keeps her den on the old lakebed among the bones of wyrms that came down to die and the bright things she has gathered from sledges that went through the ice. She has not left the hollow in an age. Something in the east has made her restless, and she has called her brood in close.
Meneshal#
- Catacomb gnawer
Health 36 · AC 9 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1
A hairless, blind gnawer the size of a hound, pale as a grub, with yellow chisel teeth and paws worn bald on bone. Packs of them have lived on the dead of Menes for longer than the city above has stood.
Emberhollows#
- Slag crawler
Health 36 · AC 9 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1
A low, many-legged thing the length of a cart, its carapace a crust of cooled slag that splits red at every joint as it moves. It grazes the warm drifts of the forge-warrens and turns on anything warmer than the stone.
- Glassback crawler
Health 40 · AC 10 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1
A low, broad crawler of the lava tubes, its back armoured in a crust of black glass where spring water has quenched the fire it wallows in. The glass cracks and chimes when it moves, and it bleeds steam.
- Vent scarab
Health 40 · AC 10 · Bite 1d10 · XP x1
A scarab beetle as big as a shield, its black shell shot with dull red where the vent heat has tempered it. Vent scarabs live in the warm cellars and the bathhouse of the Sunken City, where the Emberhollows breathe up through the floors, rolling balls of hot ash and bone for their brood, and they swarm anything that comes near it.
- Magma drake whelp
Health 77 · AC 10 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1.75
A young drake grown fat on the forge-heat, its scales the dull red of cooling iron and its throat lit from within. Half again the size of a warhorse and already jealous of the fire it was hatched in, it holds the deep forge as its own hoard.
- Boiling naiad
Health 86 · AC 11 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1.75
The boiling naiad is the spirit of the ancient Oasis's spring, followed down into the dark where its water falls on the fire. Half of it is still cool and clear; the other half boils, a roiling body of steam and scalding water around a heart of red glass. It does not know which half it is, and it hates the heat for making it this.
- The Cinder Tyrant
Health 86 · AC 11 · Bite 1d12 · XP x1.75
The Cinder Tyrant is a thing of living magma and blackened crust risen from the underflow of Mt Kyros, twice the height of a man and shedding sparks with every movement. Where it treads the stone runs molten, and the crust of its hide splits to show the furnace within.
